Casas de Fernando Alonso

At 08:00 the co-operative wine shop unlocks its roller door and the first locals appear, each carrying an empty five-litre flagon. By 08:07 the concrete floor smells of crushed Airén grapes and the day’s gossip has been exchanged. This is the only queue you’ll find in Casas de Fernando Alonso, population 1,050, altitude 730 m, bang in the middle of La Mancha’s corn-coloured plain. No peaks, no ravines – just an ocean of cereal that changes from emerald in April to biscuit-brown by July and lets you see a rain shower ten minutes before it arrives.

The horizontal village

British drivers arriving from Madrid leave the A-3 at Tarancón and watch the land flatten like a rolled pastry. The final 30 km are dead-straight CM-roads where wheat brushes the bumper and the horizon feels higher than the car. Park on Calle de la Constitución – parking is simply “against any wall that isn’t blocking a tractor” – and you’ll notice the silence first: no motorway hum, no seasonal river, only the dry whisper of poplars that line the irrigation ditches.

Casas de Fernando Alonso grew as a 16th-century resettlement grid; low, white houses share walls like semi-detached cottages and every third gateway reveals a ramp slanting underground. Those ramps lead to family bodegas, hand-cut into calcareous clay, constant 14 °C all year. Some are still candle-lit; most have a plastic tube running from the tinaja to a petrol-pump-style tap in the garage. Ask at number 27 (look for the chipped blue door) and Doña Virtudes will sell you a litre of last year’s red for €1.50, poured from a jug that once contained olive oil. It is perfectly drinkable, slightly smoky, and travels home in a rins-out water bottle – decant before your mother-in-law comes round.

The centre is cross-shaped: two streets, one church tower. The tower serves as the local mobile-phone mast, so signal improves the closer you stand to the 1750s brickwork. Inside, the single nave smells of beeswax and guinea-fowl feathers – villagers donate their game to the patron saint in return for decent rainfall. Week-day Mass is at 19:00; visitors are welcome but the priest races through it in 22 minutes so the bar opposite can reopen.

Pedalling and plodding

Flat does not equal dull. A web of farm tracks, graded but unsigned, fans out for 40 km. The classic loop heads south-east to El Provencio (10 km) along the Camino de los Llanos – tarmac the width of a Hertford lane, traffic nil, skylarks overhead. Wind is the main gradient: if it’s behind you on the outward leg, budget an extra 20 minutes for the return. Spring brings scarlet poppies and the peculiar Manchega tulip, a scruffy yellow thing that closes at midday to avoid the sun.

Hikers can follow the same paths; boots are optional, gaiters useful after rain when clay clings like wet cement. The council has installed three bird-watching hides – wooden crates with a slit, really – overlooking the seasonal lagunillas. Bring binoculars: you’ll spot red-legged partridge (the locals’ Sunday lunch), hen harriers and, in May, flocks of Montagu’s harrier using thermals off the wheat. There are no souvenir shops, so the nearest thing to a trophy is a shed feather wedged into your notebook.

What lands on the plate

Food arrives in farmhouse portions. Bar Central, the only eatery open on Monday, serves a €9 three-course menú del día that starts with pisto – a gentle ratatouille of tomato, aubergine and onion topped with a fried egg. Main choices are cordero asado (half a shoulder, crisp skin, no mint sauce) or perdiz estofada, partridge braised in wine until it spoons off the bone like Lancashire hot-pot. Pudding is arroz con leche thick enough to hold the spoon vertical. Vegetarians get the same pisto without the egg; vegans should phone the owner, Pilar, the day before – she’ll roast a tray of peppers and charge you €6.

Wine is assumed. A 500 ml carafe of house La Mancha (DO) adds €2.20; upgrade to crianza for €4 and you’ll taste American oak reminiscent of Rioja without the price tag. Cheese comes from the same co-op you visited at dawn: wedges of Manchego curado, 12-month, nutty rather than salty, vacuum-packed for Ryanair hand-luggage if you ask nicely.

Saturday is hornazo day – a pie of pork loin and hard-boiled egg baked in bread dough. Buy one before 12:00 at the bakery on Plaza de España; they sell out because families take them to the fields for lunch. Eat under the poplars, wipe oily fingers on the grass, and you have replicated the provincial picnic without a cool-box in sight.

When the plain turns cold

Summer tops 38 °C but it’s dry heat; sunscreen and a hat suffice. From November to March the plateau radiates cold: night frosts are routine, daytime highs struggle past 10 °C, and the infamous niebla (ground fog) can sit for days, cancelling any view flatter than a cricket pitch. The village is never cut off – the CM-3117 is gritted – but hotel heating is set to Spanish rather than British standards. Bring a jumper even indoors.

Festivals book-end the seasons. The fiesta patronal (last weekend of August) imports a travelling funfair so small it fits on the football pitch; bumper cars run off a diesel generator that stalls every half hour. A free paella on Sunday afternoon feeds the entire square, served from a pan two metres wide and stirred with a boat oar. In January the Fiesta de San Antón blesses animals; locals lead tethered donkeys past the church while the priest sprinkles holy water from a plastic garden sprayer. Tourists are rare enough to be offered a shot of anís at 10:30 a.m.; refusal is considered rude.

Cash, clocks and how to leave

Remember: no cashpoint. Stock up in Cuenca or at Madrid airport. Shops observe the classic siesta (14:00-17:00) and close completely on Sunday; the chemist works Saturday mornings only. If you need a taxi back to the AVE station, book the day before – there are two drivers in the district and both attend baptisms on Saturday.

That’s it. No souvenir stalls, no audio guides, no sunset viewpoint because the sun drops over an unbroken wheat seam. What you get instead is the sound of your own footsteps echoing off white walls, the smell of fermenting must drifting from cellar grates, and a wine headache cured by a slow bike ride along a road so straight you could sight it with a theodolite. When you finally head east to the airport, Madrid’s ring road will feel frantic, vertical, almost foreign. The plain, it seems, has reset your internal clock to agricultural time – and it ticks stubbornly long after the hire-car engine cools.