Villarejo de Fuentes

The cereal fields start just beyond the last house. They roll out flat and gold, stitched together by dry-stone walls and the occasional holm oak, until the sky shoulders everything else aside. At 860 metres above sea level, Villarejo de Fuentes has few defences against the wind, so the clouds move fast and the light keeps changing the rules of colour. One moment the wheat stubble glows like toast, the next it cools to pale straw. Photographers linger; everyone else simply breathes more deeply.

A village that refuses to pose

There is no chocolate-box plaza, no arcade dripping with bougainvillea. The main street is simply called Calle Mayor, wide enough for a tractor and a dog, and the houses keep their front doors shut against the dust. Yet the place is friendly in the matter-of-fact way of Castilians who have decided that curiosity is preferable to suspicion. Stop to read the hand-painted tile outside the bakery – “Horno de Leña, abierto por la mañana” – and someone will pause to check you have understood: wood-fired oven, mornings only. Inside, the baker sells a loaf the size of a house brick for €2.30 and will slice it if you ask.

The parish church, built from the same honey-coloured stone as the fields, rises at the top of the slight incline that passes for a hill. Its tower is the only vertical punctuation for kilometres, so the swallows use it as a signalling post. The nave is kept locked unless mass is due; ring the house opposite with the brass hand-bell hanging by the door and the caretaker appears, wiping flour from her hands, key ready. She will switch on one row of lights and leave you to the silence. No charge, though the donation box accepts euros and, mysteriously, a single Norwegian krone.

Cheese before breakfast

Twenty minutes on foot – or four in the car along a track that turns your suspension to jelly – the Quesos Villarejo dairy occupies a converted grain store. Sheep’s milk arrives each dawn in dented aluminium churns, still warm from the milking parlour. Through a window you can watch the curd being cut into tiny cubes, the slow-motion equivalent of chopping marshmallows. The resulting semi-curado cheese tastes like buttered toast with a faint lanolin tang; wrap a wedge in the waxed paper provided and it survives a fortnight in a rucksack. Tastings cost nothing if you buy even the smallest portion; the girl behind the counter speaks enough English to explain why the summer cheese is paler (drier pasture, more wild thyme).

Motor-caravanners have already worked this out. A neat rectangle of gravel beside the municipal pool holds four signed bays with free electricity columns and a potable water tap. Arrive after the school-run – around 3 pm – and you will usually find a space. The pool itself, open June to September, charges €2 weekdays, €3 weekends; showers are hot only when the lifeguard is on duty, so bring a towel and lower your expectations of pressure. Grey-water disposal involves lifting a square man-hole cover and bucketing: no glamorous drive-over drain, but it keeps the site quiet and the locals cheerful.

Walking without way-marks

Villarejo is a staging post rather than a destination, and that is part of its appeal. A lattice of farm tracks, originally designed for sheep and later widened by tractors, radiates into the steppe. There are no glossy panels depicting purple hoopoes, just the occasional finger-post half-scrubbed by wind-blown soil. Load an offline map and head south-east for three kilometres and you reach the abandoned railway halt of Los Olmos; stone platforms still carry faded adverts for aniseed brandy. Continue another two and you hit the dried riverbed of the Salado, where nightingales sing from tamarisks in May even though water hasn’t flowed since 2019. Boots are optional; the ground is dead flat and the worst you will encounter is thistles.

Cyclists appreciate the same geometry. A 25-km loop north to Honrubia and back uses the service road beside the N-430; lorries thunder past, but the shoulder is wide and the wheat smells of biscuit dough when the sun hits it. Take two litres of water: the only bar en route opens when the owner hears voices, and that is not guaranteed.

Food that knows the season

By 1 pm the village smells of garlic and pimentón drifting from kitchen vents. The single restaurant, Sandalo, hangs its menu on a clipboard: pisto manchego (the Spanish answer to ratatouille), gachas de almorta (thick porridge of grass-pea flour), cordero al horno whose bones arrive caramelised and too hot to touch. Prices hover round €9–€12 for a main; pudding is usually cuajada, sheep’s-milk curd drizzled with local honey that sets like toffee in the dish. House wine comes from Valdepeñas, 60 km south, and drinks softer than its Rioja cousins – no oak, just red fruit and a reminder that you are still 600 m higher than the vineyards.

If you are self-catering, the grocery shop (no sign except a faded “Frutas y Verduras” sticker) will sell you a vacuum-packed portion of caldereta, the Manchego lamb stew, ready to reheat. Ask for “para hoy” and the owner fishes one from the back of the fridge; “para mañana” earns a frozen brick and a warning to soak the bag in warm water before the pan goes on the hob. There is no cash machine in the village; the shop offers cashback if you buy chewing gum first, a transaction conducted with the solemnity of a currency exchange.

When the village doubles

Mid-August fiestas honour the Assumption and the patron saint with a programme that looks typed on the same 1980s typewriter every year. Events start at noon with a brass-band parade that feels louder because the streets amplify sound like a clay jar. By dusk the plaza fills with folding tables; neighbours produce Tupperware towers of potato omelette and the council lays on free stew from a cauldron stirred with an oar. Visitors are handed a bowl and expected to eat standing up. At midnight a fairground ride that folds out of a lorry spins children until they shriek, and the band strikes up again. Sleep is theoretical; if you are in the motor-home area, ear-plugs are less use than another glass of Valdepeñas.

Outside fiesta week the village contracts to its normal heartbeat. Dogs reclaim the shady side of the street, old men play dominoes under the single awning, and the smell of sheep’s cheese drifts across the gravel as the dairy vents steam. The horizon remains constant, a ruler-drawn line between land and sky, and the only traffic jam is caused by a tractor negotiating a right turn.

Leaving without regret

Drive out at dawn and the cereal heads are still wet with dew; they catch the low sun like thousands of small mirrors. Twenty minutes later you rejoin the A-3 Madrid–Valencia motorway, cruise control reset, coffee thermos balanced on the dash. Villarejo de Fuentes does not wave goodbye – it has work to do. Somewhere behind you the baker is sliding the first loaves into the wood oven, the cheesemaker is ladling curd, and the caretaker is locking the church until the next traveller rings the bell. You carry away a quarter-wheel of semi-curado, a faint dusting of flour on your boots, and the memory of a sky so wide it makes the sat-nav look apologetic. That is enough.