Torrubia del Castillo

The road climbs through wheat until even the wheat gives up. At 850 metres Torrubia del Castillo appears: forty-one souls, one bar, and a horizon so wide you can watch weather happen in the next province. This is the Serranía Conquense, the high steppe that separates Madrid’s commuter belt from the emptier half of Spain, and the village functions less as a destination than as a border post to nowhere in particular.

Stone houses shoulder together against the wind. Their roofs slope at odd angles, patched after decades of snow and sun, and the single church bell still marks the day at its own leisurely pace. There is no square in the Anglo sense, just a widening where the Honrubia road hesitates before continuing south. Park here; turning round later saves a five-point manoeuvre among walls built for donkeys.

What looks like a castle from the approach road turns out to be the stump of a Moorish watch-tower on a limestone crag. A five-minute scramble brings you to the summit, though the word “summit” flatters a hill barely taller than a multi-storey car park. Still, the 360-degree view explains why anyone bothered: the plain ripples eastward into Cuenca’s ochre gullies, while westward the cereal ocean runs all the way to La Mancha’s wind farms. Bring binoculars; golden eagles use the thermals, and the local farmer claims he once counted thirty griffon vultures loafing on the same thermal.

Below the ridge the village ends abruptly. Past the last house a farm track continues into a mosaic of barley, almonds and knee-high rosemary. These are the traditional drovers’ paths that linked Torrubia with its bigger neighbours long before asphalt. Walk south for forty minutes and you reach an abandoned water mill; go north and you hit the Garcimuñoz castle, a properly crenellated affair with ticket booth and weekend guide. Neither route is way-marked, so download the IGN 1:50,000 map before leaving Wi-Fi range. Mobile data exists but crawls at 1990s dial-up speed.

Back in the village the only public building still open is the former school, now Bar La Escuelita. Opening hours follow lunar logic: usually dusk till the last customer leaves, closed Monday unless the owner feels sociable. Inside, men play mus at a deal table while a wood-burning stove eats olive prunings. Order a caña and you automatically receive a saucer of migas—breadcrumbs fried in pork fat, peasant food that restaurants in London charge fourteen quid for and rename “artisan bread crumble”. If you want something stronger ask for the local anis, though be warned it tastes like liquid liquorice allsorts and kicks like a mule.

There is nowhere to stay in Torrubia itself. The sensible choice is Hotel Restaurante Marino, five kilometres down the A-3 at the Honrubia junction. Twenty-one rooms, petrol station attached, Wi-Fi that actually loads Gmail: it is Spain’s answer to a French Logis, minus the pretension. Evening menus run to roast suckling lamb and the sort of chips that still taste of potato. A set lunch with wine hovers around €14; they will do half portions if you ask, useful when driving afterwards on mountain roads designed by someone who hated straight lines.

Venture farther afield and food becomes an event. In Garcimuñoz the weekend asador fills with families who drive up from Cuenca expressly for cordero al estilo de Castilla—whole quarter of lamb slow-cooked in a wood oven until the fat turns to crunchy parchment. Vegetarians get tortilla, full stop. Book ahead; the kitchen buys lamb by the carcass and when it is gone, it is gone.

Spring and autumn deliver the kindest light. In April the fields stripe green and gold, poppies punctuate the verges, and temperatures hover in the low twenties. October brings harvest dust and the smell of crushed grapes; the same thermometer reading but with added purple sunsets. Summer is fierce—thirty-five degrees by eleven in the morning—yet the altitude knocks the edge off the night, so you sleep with the window open and wake to dew. Winter is serious: snow arrives without apology, and the Honrubia road closes if the wind drifts. Chains live in car boots from December to March.

Festivals follow the agricultural calendar. August 15 draws emigrants back for the Virgen de Agosto, a single evening of brass band, paella the size of a paddling pool, and outdoor dancing that finishes when the wine runs out. Numbers swell to perhaps 200, still intimate enough that outsiders get introduced around. Semana Santa is quieter: a dozen hooded penitents process behind a thirteenth-century statue, drums echoing off stone at a volume that would wake the dead if the dead were not already out voting in Madrid.

Practicalities first: you need a car. The nearest railway stations are Cuenca (AVE 55 min from Madrid) and Motilla del Palancar (regional crawl). Hire desks live at Madrid airport, ninety minutes up the A-3. Exit 168 is sign-posted Honrubia; ignore the sat-nav’s promise of a “faster route”—the back road is single-track and last year’s storm took out a bridge. Fill the tank before leaving the motorway; village garages are extinct. A doctor visits once a month, pharmacist once a week. Bring ibuprofen and spare tyre.

Leave expectations of boutique Spain at the motorway. Torrubia offers instead the raw material: silence, space, and the slight vertigo that comes from realising how thinly populated a European country can still be. Stay two days and you begin to calibrate to village time—morning coffee at eleven, siesta till four, conversation after dark under stars bright enough to cast shadows. Stay a week and the city feels hysterical when you return. The place will not change your life, but it might recalibrate your sense of scale, and that is sometimes enough.