Torrejoncillo del Rey

The first thing you notice is the hush. Not the muffled quiet of a library, but an open-aired silence that makes your ears ring. Torrejoncillo del Rey sits 930 metres above the cereal plains of Cuenca, high enough for the horizon to curve and for the night sky to feel like a lid screwed on too tight. Down on the A-40 motorway the lorries thunder east-west; up here even the tractor idles politely.

Three hundred and forty-five registered souls live behind the whitewashed walls. Their streets run so short you can stand in the centre, extend both arms and almost touch the ends. Yet the village still obeys medieval logic: every lane tilts toward the brick tower of the parish church, the only thing that interrupts the skyline apart from a forest of television aerials. Climb the narrow external stair at dusk and you will see what the tower was built for – a 360-degree map of ploughed squares turning colour with the season, from chlorophyll green in April to burnt-biscuit brown by late July.

A plateau that forgets it’s a mountain

Geographers call this the “Iberian threshold”, the moment the Meseta decides to grow proper hills. Torrejoncillo’s altitude gives it a climate that surprises first-time visitors to La Mancha. Frost can bite well into April; in August you sleep under a blanket while the provincial capital 40 kilometres away swelters at 35 °C. The dry air means clouds photograph themselves against cobalt, perfect for painters, murderous for gardeners. Bring lip balm; the wind scours.

Walking options start literally at the last lamppost. A farm track signed “Cerro Gordo” climbs gently south-east through low holm oak and suddenly you are on a ridge that lets you count eight different villages, none larger than a postage stamp. The round trip takes ninety minutes, requires no specialist footwear and delivers only one hazard: hunting season. October to December the local club posts paper notices the size of business cards – easy to miss, so wear something bright unless you fancy starring in a tragic regional newspaper item.

The one excursion everyone remembers

Four kilometres north the tarmac stops at a cattle grid. Beyond it a gravel lane, drivable if taken at bicycle speed, ends at the Mora Encantada, an ancient quartz mine hacked out by Romans and widened by 18th-century crystal hunters. The entrance yawns like a black mouth; inside, the temperature drops ten degrees and every torch beam turns into starlight reflected on water seeping through stone. No ticket office, no gift shop, just a rope strung across the first shaft to stop distracted visitors plummeting six metres onto chisel marks older than the Spanish language. If you suffer from vertigo or poor ankles, view it from the lip and retreat.

What passes for a centre

Back in the village the social hub is Bar La Plaza, open 07:00–14:30 and 18:00–22:00 unless Miguel has a family wedding. Coffee costs €1.20, wine €1.50, and the house rule is that any order of alcohol arrives with an unsolicited tapa – perhaps a saucer of migas, breadcrumbs fried with chorizo shards, perfect after a windy walk. English is non-existent; point, smile and you will be fed. They do not accept cards, and the nearest cash machine is in Motilla del Palancar, fifteen minutes by car. On Monday even that is shut, so stock up in Cuenca beforehand.

There is no hotel. Visitors sleep in one of three self-catering cottages signed “Casa Rural”. Expect stone floors, wood-burning stoves and Wi-Fi that works until three teenagers upload a TikTok. Low-season weekday price hovers around €70 per night for the whole house; during the August fiestas the figure triples and you must reserve months ahead unless you fancy bedding down in the back of your hire car.

Eating like someone who might hoe an acre tomorrow

Regional cooking is built around what a single family could raise on ten hectares and a few chickens. Order chuletón de cordero and you receive a lamb T-bone the size of a shoe, roasted in a domed bread oven until the fat caramelises. Gachas, a paprika-thickened porridge once eaten by shepherds when bread froze solid, appears in winter with a glass of rough local red that stains the glass purple. Vegetarians get migas sin chorizo – still calorific enough to power a small tractor. Puddings hardly exist; fruit is served, which feels revolutionary after the stodge of central Spain.

When to come, when to stay away

April and May give you green wheat, wild tulips and night temperatures that do not freeze beer. September pairs golden stubble with migrating storks; mornings are soft, afternoons still warm enough for shorts. July and August fry the landscape and crank the village volume to eleven: fireworks at 07:00, brass bands until 02:00. If you crave authenticity plus sleep, avoid fiestas week. Winter is honest – bright days, sharp nights, woodsmoke in the streets – but mountain roads ice over and Spain’s rural snow-plough budget is, frankly, theoretical.

The practical paragraph you will thank us for later

There is no public transport. Driving from Madrid takes 2 h 15 min via the A-40 and CM-210; the final eight kilometres are unlit, so arrive before dusk or prepare for suicidal rabbits. Download offline maps – mobile signal vanishes in every valley. Fill the tank in Tarancón because petrol stations close early. Sunday is a dead day: the bar shuts, the bakery is locked, the only sound is the church bell marking half-hours no one needs to keep.

A parting shot, not a sales pitch

Torrejoncillo del Rey will never appear on a glossy “Top Ten” list. It offers no souvenir tea towels, no sunset selfie pontoon, no craft ale micro-brewery. What it does provide is ratio: more sky than roofs, more stars than streetlights, more time than you realised you had lost. Come prepared – bring cash, a phrasebook and a coat whatever the month – and the village repays you with a front-row seat to the slow theatre of Castilian life. Arrive expecting entertainment and you will drive away within an hour, puzzled and faintly annoyed. Stay long enough to be woken by a cockerel that has no snooze button and you might understand why, for some people, nowhere else quite fills the lungs.