Mota de Altarejos

The cereal fields stop abruptly at Mota de Altarejos, as if Spain itself has run out of things to say. One moment you're driving through an ocean of wheat, the next you're braking for a village that appears to have been dropped from height onto the plain. Five hundred souls, give or take, living in low white houses that crouch against a horizon so flat you can watch tomorrow arrive.

This is Castilla-La Mancha at its most uncompromising. No vineyards, no windmills, no Don Quixote theme parks—just earth, sky and the kind of silence that makes city dwellers nervous. At 980 metres above sea level, the altitude punches above its weight. Winter mornings drop to minus eight, summer afternoons hit forty. Spring lasts approximately three weeks, autumn even less. The rest is endurance.

What passes for a centre

The village crossroads serves as plaza, car park and social hub. Park here—anywhere else blocks someone's gate—and you'll notice the only commercial activity: a bar that opens when the owner feels like it, usually Saturday evenings and fiestas. There's no shop, no cash machine, nowhere to buy water. The nearest supermarket is seven kilometres away in San Lorenzo de la Parrilla, a town whose main claim to fame is having things to buy.

The church of San Pedro stands opposite, locked except for Sunday mass at noon. It's fifteenth-century, heavily restored, and notable mainly for being the tallest building for thirty miles. Inside, the temperature drops ten degrees—a relief in August, hypothermic in January. The bell still marks the hours, though time moves differently here. Afternoons stretch like chewing gum. Nights fall sudden as a guillotine.

Walk the three streets that constitute the village and you'll see what rural depopulation looks like up close. Perhaps one house in three shows signs of life: curtains, potted plants, a radio murmuring through open windows. The rest stand shuttered, their owners working in Madrid or Valencia, returning only for harvest or funerals. Some properties have collapsed entirely, leaving gaps like missing teeth in a smile that's trying too hard.

The surrounding nothingness

This is precisely why people make the detour. Mota de Altarejos sits in the middle of Spain's best-kept secret: proper wilderness without mountains getting in the way. The surrounding plain, technically the southern edge of the Meseta Central, stretches 360 degrees to a horizon that never arrives. Walking tracks radiate outward like spokes, following farm boundaries established when these fields fed imperial armies.

The GR-175 long-distance path passes three kilometres south, but few bother with the connection. Instead, locals follow the agricultural tracks that link cortijos—farmsteads whose names read like a litany of lost hopes: El Paraíso, La Estrella, El Socorro. These dirt roads make perfect walking. Flat, obvious, impossible to get lost unless you try. Dawn and dusk bring the only shade; midday sun reduces everything to bleached bone white.

Birdwatchers pack telescopes for winter visitors: skylarks in their thousands, the occasional great bustard standing motionless as a garden ornament. Spring adds roller birds and Montagu's harriers quartering the fields. Summer is for swifts and heatstroke. Autumn brings cranes flying south in perfect formation, their calls carrying for miles across the empty air.

Cycling works too, though bring your own bike. The CM-210 road from Cuenca carries perhaps ten cars daily, half of them tractors. Surface wind is constant, direction seemingly random. Twenty kilometres east lies Mota del Cuervo, famous for its windmills and slightly larger range of things that aren't there. Twenty kilometres west: nothing at all until you hit the A-3 motorway, Spain's main artery to the Mediterranean.

The practical business of visiting

Let's be clear: Mota de Altarejos is not a destination. It's a punctuation mark in a longer sentence. Base yourself in Cuenca, thirty-two kilometres north, where the Posada de San José offers monastery rooms carved into rock and staff who speak English without being condescending. From there it's a forty-minute drive through landscape that gets progressively more lunar.

There's no accommodation in the village and no prospect of any. The medical centre opens Tuesdays only; emergencies require a helicopter from Cuenca that takes twenty-five minutes if the weather's playing. Mobile signal is theoretical—download offline maps before you leave civilisation. Cash is king; the bar doesn't do cards and there's no ATM within fifteen miles.

Food requires forward planning. The weekend bar serves toast, coffee and beer. For anything more substantial, Cuenca's Calle San Pedro delivers roast suckling pig that would make a vegetarian weep. Buy supplies there: water, sun cream, emergency chocolate. Picnic tables exist in Mota de Altarejos—concrete slabs with views across the plain—but bring everything except the view.

Timing the intangibles

April brings green wheat and temperatures that British walkers would call perfect. The village's few remaining inhabitants emerge to tend vegetable plots, exchanging gossip across fences that wouldn't keep out a determined sheep. October provides similar conditions plus migrating birds, though mornings start frosty and the bar might be closed for the season.

July and August are for masochists. The sun arrives with intent at seven and doesn't slacken until nine at night. Shade is mythical. The village empties further as residents flee to coastal second homes, leaving a skeleton crew of pensioners and the odd foreigner who read the wrong travel blog. Winter brings its own harsh beauty—snow is rare but frost patterns the fields white for weeks. The silence deepens to something almost physical.

Fiestas happen in mid-August, assuming enough people return to constitute a crowd. There's a procession, obviously, and a communal meal in the street that outsiders can join if they contribute wine or dessert. Fireworks are modest; the real entertainment is watching three generations of the same family negotiate seating arrangements without bloodshed.

The honesty clause

Some visitors leave after twenty minutes, defeated by the scale of the nothing. Others stay for hours, hypnotised by sky and space. Mota de Altarejos offers no Instagram moments, no souvenir shops, no stories to impress colleagues back home. What it provides is a masterclass in absence—the rare chance to experience Spain as it exists when nobody's looking.

Come prepared, come curious, and come with a full tank of petrol. The village won't change your life. But it might remind you what silence sounds like, and how extraordinary that can feel when the alternative is notifications, traffic and the endless British drizzle.