Alcázar del Rey

The thermometer on the car dashboard drops three degrees in the final five kilometres. At 885 metres, Alcázar del Rey sits high enough for the air to sharpen, even in June, and for mobile-phone reception to flicker in and out like a bored lighthouse. The first thing that strikes you is the quiet— not the postcard hush of marketeers’ brochures, but the practical, everyday silence of a place where 130 registered residents outnumber passing cars most hours of the week.

A Village That Forgot to Shrink

You arrive from the CM-412, a secondary road that unrolls across wheat and barley like a beige ribbon. The turn-off is signalled only by a small white stone; blink and you’ll rehearse a three-point turn in the next lay-by. Inside the village the streets are barely two donkeys wide, yet someone has still found space for a plaza, a church tower and a bench occupied, more often than not, by a single resident keeping an eye on absolutely nothing.

The houses are low, thick-walled, the colour of dry earth. Their lower halves are painted white or indigo— a nod to the old belief that azure repels insects— and the wooden doors have shrunk and swollen through so many seasons that you can see daylight underneath most of them. Renovations are rare; when a roof collapses it is patched, not replaced, giving the streetscape a dental record that would make a British surveyor wince. Strangely, this shabbiness works. Nothing feels staged, because nothing is.

One Church, Zero Tartan Gift Shops

The parish church of San Pedro opens, in theory, at ten o’clock. Timing is flexible; if the key-holder is still feeding chickens, you wait. Inside, the nave is cool enough to store butter, the stone floor scooped into shallow bowls by centuries of foot traffic. There are no audio guides, no coin-operated light boxes, just a printed card that lists the cost of candles: 20 céntimos for the thin ones, 50 for the fat. Drop the money into an enamel plate and the coins echo like gunshots.

Climb the tower if the sacristan is in a good mood— the spiral stair is only 63 steps, but the treads are worn to a 30-degree camber. From the top you can identify every roof in the village, plus a horizon that stretches 40 km south towards the Sierra de Alcaraz. On a clear morning the fields below resemble corduroy, the furrows combed by tractors that cost more than every house façade combined.

Walking Rings Around the Combine Harvesters

Alcázar del Rey is surrounded by a latticework of agricultural tracks, wide enough for a Claas combine yet empty enough for an afternoon ramble. Distances are modest: strike out east and within 25 minutes you’ll pass the last irrigation tank, its surface decorated with red-rimmed terrapins who have never seen a tourist brochure. From here the path dips into a shallow valley where wheat gives way to vines— small, bush-trained Grenache that survives on 350 mm of rain a year and tastes, when bottled, like crushed currants and iron.

Serious hikers sometimes push on towards the Cerro de San Cristóbal (1,120 m), a limestone outcrop 6 km north-west that serves as a roost for kestrels and, allegedly, the occasional eagle owl. The gradient is gentle, but take water: the dry air wicks sweat before you feel it, and the only bar in the village shuts unpredictably when Concha has to drive her mother to the clinic in Mota del Cuervo.

When 30 Degrees Isn’t 30 Degrees

Altitude changes everything. In July Madrid swelters at 38 °C while Alcázar del Rey tops out at 31 °C, but the sun feels closer, as though someone has removed a layer of glass from the sky. British visitors routinely underestimate the burn time: SPF 30 at noon here equals SPF 15 on a Bournemouth beach. Conversely, January nights can dip to –8 °C; if you book the lone holiday cottage, pack the same fleece you wore to the Peak District last March. Snow is rare but not impossible— when it arrives the village’s single grit lorry must cover 42 km of county lanes, so tyres and patience are tested.

Access reflects the seasons. The CM-412 is kept open year-round, but after heavy rain the unclassified road from El Picazo turns to chocolate mousse; local farmers chain up and plough through, while rental Clios rethink their life choices. If winter wheat is being harvested late, expect the occasional combine convoy crawling at 15 km/h— there are no passing lanes, and overtaking on loose chippings will redecorate your windscreen.

Eating (or Not) Like a Local

The village itself has no restaurant, no café-bars, not even a bakery. What it does have is a freezer chest inside the co-operative store that dispenses vacuum-packed morteruelo— a pâté-like stew of wild boar, pork liver and spices— ready to reheat in the cottage microwave. Pair it with a €4 bottle of DO La Mancha Tempranillo sold from a shelf between the mouse poison and the light bulbs. If you require table service, drive 18 minutes to La Fuente de la Higuera in El Picazo, where a three-course menú del día costs €12 and the waiter will kindly explain, in a mix of Castilian and semaphore, what gazpacho pastor actually contains (answer: breadcrumbs, game stock and enough garlic to stun a vampire).

Fiestas Without Foam Cannons

Festivities revolve around the feast of Santiago, held on the nearest weekend to 25 July, when the population quadruples. The schedule is reassuringly low-tech: Saturday evening mass followed by a paella cooked in a pan two metres wide; Sunday morning chirigota (satirical songs) performed by men in cardboard hats; Monday at 07:00, a rocket is fired and everyone goes home. Visitors are welcome to join the queue for paella— bring your own bowl, spoon and, critically, a folding chair because Spanish queues are horizontal rather than vertical. There are no wristbands, no entry fees, and the only merchandising is a €2 raffle ticket for a ham leg you must carry onto the 18:30 BlaBlaCar back to Cuenca.

Leaving Without the Gift Shop

By early afternoon the wind picks up, rattling the corrugated roofs of abandoned pigsties. Swifts appear overhead, slicing the sky into crumbs. You could wait for the key-holder to reopen the church, but more likely you’ll start the engine, reassured that places still exist where Google Street View last passed in 2009. Alcázar del Rey offers no souvenir tea towels, no audio-visual displays, not even a fridge magnet. What it does offer is a calibrated sense of scale: more horizon than humans, more sky than stories. Drive away slowly— partly to spare the suspension, partly because the village recedes in the rear-view mirror faster than it ever arrived through the windscreen.