Navas de Jorquera

The morning mist pools at 708 metres, leaving Navas de Jorquera suspended above a cotton-wool sea. At this altitude, the village sits higher than Ben Nevis's lower slopes, yet the Sierra de Alcaraz rises still further to the south-east, creating a natural amphitheatre of vines, almond groves and wheat that changes colour with the seasons. Locals insist you can taste the difference in their wine – the grapes ripen more slowly here, developing complexity that flatland vineyards never achieve.

The Village That Refused to Grow

Five hundred souls live behind the whitewashed walls, a number that hasn't shifted much since the 1950s. The architecture tells the story: single-storey houses with doors wide enough for a mule cart, their wooden beams darkened by centuries of woodsmoke. New builds are prohibited within the historic centre – planning permission requires maintaining the original footprint, which explains why the bakery still operates from what looks like someone's front room. Ring the bell marked 'Pan' between 7 and 9am; María will sell you a loaf still warm from the wood-fired oven for €1.20.

The parish church of San Pedro occupies the highest point, not through grand design but simple necessity. When bandits raided from the neighbouring kingdom of Valencia, villagers needed somewhere defensible. These days, the only invasion comes during August's fiesta, when the population triples as descendants return from Madrid and Barcelona. They sleep in ancestral homes, their London and Berlin accents mixing with the local dialect that's closer to Murcian than textbook Castilian.

Walking Through Three Ecosystems

Start at the Fuente Vieja, the old spring where women washed clothes until the 1980s. A marked path leads east through cultivated fields – look for the stone walls built without mortar, their precise fitting a skill passed down through Muslim and Christian craftsmen. After twenty minutes, the path climbs through monte bajo, Mediterranean scrubland where wild rosemary and thyme release scent when brushed. Booted eagles circle overhead, hunting the rabbits that emerge at dusk.

The full circuit to Jorquera takes three hours, dropping 300 metres to the Júcar river gorge. The limestone cliffs support Griffon vultures whose two-metre wingspan casts moving shadows across the path. Return via the Camino de los Neveros, an ice-route where muleteers once hauled snow from mountain caves to coastal cities. The stone channels they carved for sliding ice blocks remain visible, now home to lizards basking in temperatures that reach 40°C in July.

Winter transforms these paths. When snow falls – increasingly rare, though January 2021 brought 20 centimetres – the village becomes accessible only via the AL-7050 from Albacete. The mountain road closes at kilometre 32 when conditions deteriorate; locals keep chains in their cars from December through March. Spring arrives late at this elevation: almonds blossom in April, a full month behind the coast.

What Grows Between the Rocks

The denominación de origen Manchuela stretches across both sides of the provincial border, producing reds from Tempranillo and Bobal grapes that handle the altitude's temperature swings. Bodega La Fuente, on the village edge, opens Saturdays by appointment only. Their crianza spends twelve months in American oak, developing tobacco notes that pair with the local gazpacho manchego – nothing like the cold soup foreigners expect, but a hearty game stew thickened with flatbread.

The Tuesday market occupies a car park that serves as the plaza mayor on other days. Stallholders arrive from Tarazona de la Mancha with vegetables grown in greenhouse tunnels, their produce arriving before dawn to avoid the heat. Look for tiznao, a salt cod and onion dish that sustained field workers during the wheat harvest. The recipe hasn't changed since Jewish conversos adapted it from their Sabbath meal, substituting cod for the prohibited pork.

Restaurant options are limited to two bars and the municipal casino – a social club, not a gambling den – where non-members can eat if they sign the visitors' book. Try the migas on Sunday morning: breadcrumbs fried with garlic and chorizo, served with a fried egg and grapes. The combination sounds unlikely until you learn that vineyard workers needed calories and hydration simultaneously during September's harvest.

The Five-Kilometre Commute Through History

Jorquera's medieval fortress lies five kilometres north, but the journey takes twenty minutes on the winding AL-7049. The road follows an Islamic calzada – note the metre-wide stone drainage channels that still function after a thousand years. Park at the Mirador del Diablo for views across the Júcar's horseshoe bend, where the river has carved 200-metre cliffs through limestone laid down when this area was a Jurassic sea.

Back in Navas, the evening paseo begins at 8pm sharp. Grandparents occupy the bench outside the pharmacy while teenagers circle on bicycles bought online but assembled by their fathers. The bar fills for la hora del vermut – order your sweet vermouth with sifón, sparkling water from a siphon bottle that hasn't changed design since the 1920s. Conversation covers rainfall statistics, the price of diesel for tractors, and whether the British family who bought the ruined farmhouse will actually restore it or, as predicted, abandon the project after discovering the cost of installing central heating at altitude.

The last bus to Albacete leaves at 7pm, which means overnighting unless you've hired a car. The only accommodation is three rooms above the bakery, basic but clean, where the scent of rising dough replaces any need for an alarm clock. Breakfast is included – coffee with churros at 6am when María starts her shift. She'll explain why village dogs bark at 3am: they're responding to the wild boar that descend from the sierra to raid the vineyards, their tracks visible in the morning mud between the rows of vines that climb towards the Spanish sky.