Paredes

At 900 metres above sea level, Paredes sits high enough for the air to feel thinner, the wind sharper, and the horizon wider than anywhere else in Castilla-La Mancha. From the village's single main street, the land drops away in every direction—wheat fields, almond groves, and scrubland stretching out like a rumpled blanket until they merge with the sky. On clear days, which are most days, you can see the slate-blue ridges of the Serranía de Cuenca forty kilometres to the east. At night, the Milky Way appears so close it seems to drip into the stone gutters.

This is cereal country, where the soil is thin and the rainfall thinner. Farmers still use the old cycle: plough in January, sow barley in March, harvest by late June before the thermometers breach 35 °C. The rhythm sets the village clock. When the combine harvesters arrive, everyone knows; when they leave, silence returns so abruptly you can hear your own pulse.

Stone, Adobe, and the Smell of Woodsmoke

Paredes grew up around a spring—now just a damp patch behind the church—where shepherds once watered flocks on the transhumance route from La Mancha to the Cuenca uplands. The houses they built are low, one-storey affairs of honey-coloured stone and adobe, roofs weighted with terracotta tiles that rattle in winter gales. Many sit empty; others have been patched up by weekenders from Madrid who arrive with 4×4s and crates of Rioja, then drive off again on Sunday night. You can tell which homes are occupied by the smoke: in December the chimneys work overtime, burning holm-oak prunings that perfume the whole village.

There is no hotel, no B&B, not even a corner shop. The nearest bar is seven kilometres down the CM-412 in Graja de Iniesta, where a coffee still costs €1.20 and the owner keeps a hunting dog tethered to the espresso machine. Bring provisions, or plan to drive for lunch. What Paredes does offer is space: a grid of three streets you can walk in ten minutes, then fields that go on forever.

Walking the Calanchos

Head north on the unsignposted track past the cemetery and you drop into a miniature badlands of gullies and chalk pinnacles known locally as calanchos. The path, really a dried-up watercourse, zig-zags for five kilometres until it meets the Arroyo de la Vega. In spring the slopes are flecked with poppies and wild marjoram; by July everything has burnt to biscuit brown. Griffon vultures wheel overhead, riding thermals that rise from the baked earth. Carry more water than you think you’ll need—there’s no shade, and the altitude tricks you into underestimating dehydration.

If you prefer level ground, follow the grain silos south-east towards the abandoned cortijo of Los Llanos. The track is wide enough for a tractor (and you will meet tractors) and skirts fields of saffron crocus planted by an experimental cooperative. Harvest happens in late October: purple petals are picked at dawn, the crimson stigmas plucked out the same evening. One gram of proper La Mancha saffron needs two hundred flowers; the going rate last year was €3,800 a kilo. You won’t see any of that money, but the farmers will let you watch if you stand well back.

When the Wind Turns Cold

Winter arrives overnight, usually between the last weekend of October and the first of November. Temperatures plummet to –8 °C, and the dominant cierzo wind whistles across the plateau, finding every crack in the mortar. Snow is rare but frost is not; on still mornings the fields glitter like shattered glass. Roads remain open—the CM-412 is gritted within an hour—but the single bus from Cuenca stops running, cancelled for “inclemencia meteorológica” until March. Without a car you are stranded.

Yet this is when the village is most alive. Returned emigrants fire up ancestral fireplaces, and the population swells from fifty-five to perhaps ninety. Someone always slaughters a pig; the matanza becomes a three-day fiesta of morcilla-stuffing and chorizo-airing, accompanied by jugs of gachas—a paprika-spiked porridge that separates the tourists from the locals. If you’re invited, bring a bottle of something strong and refuse the first offer of food: manners demand three refusals before acceptance.

Practicalities for the Unprepared

Cuenca, with its AVE high-speed link to Madrid, lies 82 km away on decent asphalt. Allow ninety minutes by car: the last 22 km weave through dehesa country where wild boar wander at dusk. Petrol stations are scarce; fill up in Cañada del Hoyo. There is no mobile coverage in Paredes itself—walk fifty metres up the hill behind the church for one bar of 4G. Accommodation options cluster in the wine town of Iniesta, 25 minutes south: the three-star Hotel La Torre charges around €70 for a double, including a breakfast of tostada with crushed tomato and enough olive oil to silence an English cardiologist.

Pack boots with ankle support; the limestone is sharp and farmers don’t bother removing rusted baling wire. A light fleece suffices in May, but by October you’ll want down. Binoculars are worth the weight: apart from vultures, you might spot black-shouldered kites or the elusive Dupont’s lark, which sings only at dawn from the tops of thyme bushes.

The Silence After the Harvest

Leave by 3 p.m. in high summer. Any later and the heat shimmers off the road, turning tarmac into optical soup. As you drive away, the village recedes in the rear-view mirror—first the church tower, then the cypress trees, finally just a smudge of smoke against bronze hills. What lingers is not a checklist of sights but a sensation: the way sound carries across an empty plateau, the smell of rain on parched soil, the realisation that somewhere between the sky and the soil there is still room for a place to breathe. Paredes doesn’t ask you to fall in love; it asks only that you notice.