San Clemente

At 720 metres above sea level, San Clemente sits just high enough to make your ears pop on the drive up from the plain. The A-3 motorway spits you out at kilometre 146, and suddenly the endless wheat sea of La Mancha ripples into low hills. It's still high plateau country – dry, windy, unapologetically brown in summer – but up here the air thins and the horizon tilts just enough to remind you that Cuenca's mountains proper begin thirty kilometres east.

A Plaza That Works for a Living

The Plaza Mayor doesn't do the usual Spanish village trick of manicured perfection. Yes, the arcaded town hall is textbook Renaissance, all honey-coloured stone and carved acanthus leaves, yet the square's four sides still house butchers, insurance brokers and a bakery that starts baguette production at 4.30 a.m. Metal shutters rattle up, delivery vans nose between the plane trees, and the smell of fresh dough drifts across to the café where farmers argue over barley prices. Nothing is staged; this is simply where 5,000 people do their everyday business.

Slip through the side lanes and the architecture tells a quieter story. Whitewashed walls bulge like settled pastry, timber doors are studded with iron nails the size of golf balls, and every so often a coat of arms announces an ancestral house that once put up travelling merchants on the drove road to Murcia. The parish church of Santiago Apóstol, rebuilt piecemeal between the 15th and 18th centuries, keeps a sun-bleached brick bell-tower that looks more Andalusian than Castilian. Inside, the main attraction is price-free and crowd-free: a gilded high altar that locals still call "el escaparate" – the shop window – because it once dazzled muleteers into dropping a coin in the collection box.

Wine Without the Theatre

La Mancha may churn out more litres than Rioja, yet San Clemente's Bodegas Puente de Rus co-operative keeps things refreshingly low-key. Turn up at 11 a.m. on a weekday and the oenologist, Jesús, will probably be the one pouring. The tasting bar occupies a corner of the bottling hall, so you sip tempranillo while a forklift beeps past with next week's supermarket order. Four wines, two cheeses, a stubby baguette: seven euros, payable at the desk that doubles as the weighbridge office. The young crianza slips down easily – bright cherry, no oak overkill – and if you buy six bottles they knock the tasting fee off the bill. No gift shop, no tour bus parking, just remember to bring your own carrier bags because they never have enough.

Walk the vineyards afterwards. A signed footpath leaves from the football ground on the western edge of town and loops five kilometres through trellised vines and regimented olive rows. The soil is rust-red, littered with limestone shards that crunch like broken pottery. In May the vines are still infant-green; by late July the leaves turn leathery and bunches swell tight against the heat. Take water – shade is scarce and the track is exposed enough to make British shoulders resemble San Miguel shrimps within the hour.

When the Wind Turns Cold

Altitude works both ways. Summer days hit 35 °C, yet after dusk the thermometer can free-fall fifteen degrees. Bring a jumper even in August. Winter, by contrast, is brutal: clear, iron-blue skies, daytime highs of 7 °C and nights that dip below –5 °C. If you visit between December and February, time your arrival for late morning; ground frost lingers in the shadows until nearly eleven, and the narrow streets funnel a wind that feels straight off the steppe. Snow is rare but not impossible – a weekend fall in January 2021 cut the village off for 24 hours when the Cuenca road became a bob-sleigh run.

That weather keeps the summer fiestas sane. The main bash honouring Santiago Apóstol (25 July) adds perhaps 1,000 visitors to the population, nothing like the human traffic jams of nearby Almagro. Brass bands march at a stroll, fireworks are modest, and the bull-running – held in a temporary ring rather than through the streets – finishes early enough for toddlers to watch. Food stalls cluster round the medieval granary: lamb burgers laced with rosemary, bowls of gazpacho manchego (the hot, gamey stew, not the chilled soup), and plastic cups of cloudy lemon beer that cost €2. If you hate crowds, come instead for the Virgen del Rosario procession in early October; the same brass band, a tenth of the people, and free bags of roasted almonds handed out by the confraternity.

A Bed for the Night – or Perhaps Not

Accommodation is the weak link. The 18-room Posada de Santiago occupies a 16th-century house opposite the church and gets the period details right – beamed ceilings, terracotta floors, wi-fi that only works in the corridor. Doubles from €65 including garage parking, but it's often booked by cycling groups who use the village as a halfway stop on the Camino de Levante. Alternative: drive ten kilometres south to the roadside Hostal El Corregidor, clean, modern, soulless, €45 a night and next to a 24-hour truck stop that does surprisingly good churros. Most British visitors treat San Clemente as a day trip from Cuenca (55 minutes) or combine it with windmill-peppered Consuegra on the return hop to Madrid.

The One Thing Everyone Misses

Below the modern sports pavilion, a gravel track drops to the Roman bridge over the Rus ravine. It's not in Rome, nor even in Cuenca city: Segobriga's ghostly theatre lies 40 kilometres away, yet this single-arch structure carried the imperial road south-east to Carthago Nova. Two minutes from the ring road, sheep now graze the banks and teenagers use the parapet as a diving platform into an algae-green pool. Ignore the graffiti – the masonry is original, the setting absurdly quiet, and you'll probably have it to yourself. Bring a picnic, but take your rubbish back up the hill; the bin got nicked years ago and the council never replaced it.

San Clemente won't change your life. It will, however, serve up a slice of inland Spain that still functions for its own inhabitants rather than for the tourism spreadsheets. If that sounds like faint praise, spend a Sunday morning watching grandparents chase toddlers round the plaza while the church bells ring the hour wrong by three minutes. Then buy a loaf still warm from the bakery, tear off the crust, and decide whether anywhere really needs to be more "must-see" than this.