Montalvos

The wheat stops here. After twenty kilometres of straight road where the only punctuation marks are concrete grain silos, Montalvos appears as a low white smudge on the horizon. No dramatic approach, no sudden gorge or castle on a crag—just the village doing what it has done since the Reconquista: existing at field level, 690 metres above the Mediterranean but still somehow down-to-earth.

The Geography of Not-Much

Castilla-La Mancha is famous for tilting at windmills; Montalvos never bothered. The horizon is ruler-flat, the soil a calcareous crust that cracks into hexagons every July. This is cereal country—wheat, barley, the occasional stripe of vines—divided into square kilometre plots by dirt tracks wide enough for a combine harvester to perform a three-point turn. The Júcar river once flirted with the district boundary but thought better of it, leaving the village dependent on boreholes and winter prayers. What water there is goes first to the crops; humans get what’s left, which explains the low-slung houses and absence of swimming pools.

Walk ten minutes in any direction and the settlement thins to a single street of dwellings, then nothing. Keep walking and you’ll meet the ghost hamlet of Los Buhos, three ruined farmhouses and a concrete threshing floor where storks now nest on the telegraph poles. The OS-style simplicity is either liberating or unnerving, depending on your tolerance for sky.

A One-Plaza Town

Montalvos has no hotel, no museum, no gift shop selling fridge magnets shaped like Don Quixote. The entire social fabric fits inside Plaza de la Constitución: bar, church, bench, tree. The bar opens at seven for the farmers’ breakfast—coffee, brandy, chunk of tortilla—and closes when the last customer leaves, usually the owner. Inside, the television shows agricultural weather on loop; outside, the church bell strikes the quarters whether anyone is listening or not. The building itself, Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, is fifteenth-century in footprint but nineteenth in spirit, its interior freshly whitewashed every spring to cover the damp that seeps up from the adobe foundations. Step in on a weekday morning and the only light comes from the open door; the Virgin looks relieved to have company.

Houses are single-storey for a reason: wind. The Manchega gale can pick up a roof tile and send it spinning like a poker chip. Walls are therefore thick, roofs weighted with stones, doorways narrowed so the blast whistles past rather than in. Many fronts are painted the customary ochre-pink below, chalk-white above, a two-tone scheme devised to hide tractor-splatter and reflect heat in equal measure. Peek through an open gate and you’ll see the internal patio: clay pot of geraniums, rabbit hutch, maybe a Seat 600 rusting quietly in the corner. Restoration has reached about every fifth dwelling; the rest carry cracks that map droughts back to the 1940s.

What Passes for Action

Come at dawn and the place is already awake: lights on in the grain store, diesel engines coughing, dogs negotiating territorial rights. By nine the tractors have vanished into the mosaic of fields; the village falls silent except for the grain store’s conveyor belt, a mechanical heartbeat that runs until the last lorry leaves at dusk. Mid-morning is when the elderly reconvene on the bench, moving with the sun like human sundials. They will tell you—slowly—who still keeps chickens, whose olives are ready for picking, and why the young leave (no work that doesn’t involve a harvester cab).

Walking is the only organised activity. A 5-kilometre loop south-east passes the abandoned aerodrome built during the Civil War—just a grass strip and a brick hut now home to swallows. Another track heads west to the término boundary stone marked 1946; from here you can watch the plain change colour as cumulus shadows skate across the stubble. Spring brings calandrilas and skylarks; autumn adds passing cranes high enough to be heard but not seen. Binoculars help, though locals will assume you are surveying land prices.

Calendar of the Departed

Fiesta proper starts on 15 August when emigrants return from Madrid, Valencia, even Swindon. The population quadruples overnight; cars line the wheatfields like a pop-up dealership. Proceedings open with a mass followed by paella for 400 cooked in a pan the size of a satellite dish. Evenings mean verbena: plastic tables, €1.50 cañas, lottery tickets that win you a ham. At midnight the village hires the cheapest fireworks licence in Spain—three rockets and a catherine wheel nailed to the church door. By the 18th the exodus begins; wheat stubble reclaims the car park, silence reclaims the plaza.

Smaller markers punctuate the year: 1 November when families picnic among the marble niches of the cemetery; Carnival weekend when primary-school kids dress as broccoli florets; 24 December when tractors form a guard of honour for the newborn Jesus in the nativity play. Outsiders are welcome but not essential; these are rituals performed for each other, not for Instagram.

Eating (Elsewhere) and Sleeping (Nowhere)

There is no restaurant in Montalvos, only the bar’s fridge of cling-filmed bocadillos. Serious food happens 12 km away in La Roda at Asador La Solana: gazpacho manchego (the bread-thickened game stew, not the cold tomato soup), perdiz estofada, queso manchego curado for €14 a kilo. The village will, however, sell you wine if you ask at the agricultural co-op—bring your own five-litre demijohn and €6 fills it with tempranillo that hasn’t seen a label, let alone a marketing department.

Accommodation means driving. Closest options are rural casas rurales in neighbouring Munera (20 min) or the business hotel beside the A-31 motorway—functional but at least the air-con works when the plain hits 42 °C. Campers sometimes ask to pitch on the sports field; the mayor, who doubles as PE teacher, will shrug and say “no fires, no bottles”. Payment is a six-pack left in the bar fridge.

When to Turn Up, When to Drive On

April-May gives green wheat and temperatures that hover either side of 20 °C—perfect for walking before the sun climbs above the threshing floors. September adds the grape harvest; heavy lorries thunder through at dawn, coating the streets in a fine mauve powder. July and August are for lizards and mad dogs; midday heat tops 38 °C and shade is rationed to the north side of the church. Winter is crisp, often 0 °C at breakfast, but the clarity of light lets you see the snow on the Sierra de Alcaraz 60 km away. Rain is episodic; when it arrives the clay turns to grease and even tractors slide sideways.

Fuel up in Albacete before you leave—the last petrol pump is 35 km away and closes for siesta. Phone coverage switches between “one bar” and “emergency calls only” depending on which way the wind blows. Bring cash; the bar’s card machine dates from 2003 and sulks on cloudy days.

Montalvos will never qualify for UNESCO, never host a yoga retreat. It is a place to stop between places, to recalibrate your sense of scale. Spend an hour, buy a bag of dried chickpeas from the co-op, listen to the conveyor belt rattle the grain into the silo. Then drive on, the wheat closing behind you like a calm green sea.