Campillo de Altobuey

The bakery shutters come down at two o'clock sharp on Sundays, and the village's single bar follows at half-past eleven every night. In Campillo de Altobuey, clocks run on bakery ovens and the barman's watch, not on tourist timetables. At 935 metres above sea level, this scatter of red-brick houses looks east across La Mancha's cereal ocean and west towards the first wrinkles of the Cuenca hills. The air is thinner, cleaner, and—depending on the season—either furnace-dry or sharp enough to make a Londoner reach for a second jumper.

High-Plateau Life, Half an Hour from the Motorway

Drive fifteen minutes beyond the Minglanilla exit of the A-3 and the tarmac narrows, the verges sprout rosemary and thyme, and the temperature drops a couple of degrees. Campillo sits on a shallow ridge, which means winter nights can touch –8 °C and summer afternoons regularly top 38 °C; spring and autumn are the sweet spots, when the light turns honey-coloured and the prevailing wind smells of wet earth rather than hot dust.

Because there is no railway, no bus, and no Uber, you arrive by car or you don't arrive at all. Valencia airport is ninety minutes east; Alicante two hours south. Hire-car rates in Valencia are usually lower, and the westbound A-3 is quieter than the coastal autopistas. Fill the tank before leaving the motorway—the village pumps close at eight and card readers are temperamental.

Brick, Clay and the Sound of Boots on Earth

The centre is a rectangle of houses the colour of terracotta pans, their rooflines interrupted only by the parish tower finished in 1787 with stone hauled from quarries twenty kilometres away. There are no souvenir shops, no guided tours, no multilingual audio wands. Instead you get the squeak of a metal gate as someone heads to the potato plot, and the smell of wood smoke from kitchens that still cook on open hearths through winter.

Walk south along Calle San Pedro and the street dissolves into a farm track within two hundred metres. Keep going and you meet the GR-160 footpath, a nine-kilometre loop that threads through vineyards and stands of holm oak. The climb is gentle—120 metres total—but boots beat trainers here; the soil is a mosaic of flint and clay that cakes soles after rain. From the ridge you can see five other villages, each a pale smudge capped by its own identical church tower, as if some 18th-century architect offered a buy-one-get-one-free deal.

What to Eat When the Baker Has Gone Home

Spanish rural menus can read like a test of courage: tripe, brains, pigs' trotters. Campillo kitchens dial it back. At Bar Nueva—really a front room with three tables and a 1980s football poster—order pisto manchego, a slow-cooked tangle of aubergine and tomato that tastes like sunshine stored in a jar. Ask for queso curado suave if you prefer sheep's cheese that whispers rather than shouts. A plate of each, plus a glass of house red, costs €6.50. They still write the bill by hand and add it up on the paper tablecloth.

Five minutes outside the village, Juan and María Carmen convert whatever their garden yields into three-course dinners for guests at Cuesta de Patas. Garlic can be tamed on request; bread is baked in a domed clay oven that predates the couple's 40-year marriage. Brits who insist on a cup of tea get a proper mug, not a thimble-sized café con leche glass, and the pair will happily pack sandwiches for walkers who want to stay on the trail at lunchtime—provided you ask the night before.

Saturday Market, Sunday Silence

On Saturday mornings the main square fills with six stalls: one for olives, one for honey, one for cheap T-shirts, one for kitchen pans, one for sheep's-cheese truckles, and a final van that sells bedding plants you probably can't take home through customs. By one o'clock the vans have driven off, the square is hosed down, and the village sinks into the siesta that lasts until five. Sunday is quieter still; church bells mark the hours, but nothing opens except the church itself and, briefly, the bakery for those who forgot to buy breakfast.

If you need cash, the nearest ATM is in Minglanilla. Many bars will reluctantly run a card for food, but the bakery and the village shop are cash-only. Phone signal flickers: Vodafone and EE hold on in the square, disappear in the back lanes. Download an offline map before you leave the motorway.

Winter White-Outs and August Dust

Between December and February the surrounding fields can be white with frost at dawn; the GR-160 turns glassy and locals swap walking boots for wellingtons. Unless you have winter-driving experience—and snow chains in the boot—plan day trips from lower ground rather than overnight stays. The upside is empty trails and skies so clear you can pick out the Sierra de Javalambre seventy kilometres away.

In July and August the thermostat forces life to slow to a crawl. Evenings are the liveliest time: neighbours drag kitchen chairs onto the pavement, children kick footballs until the ball vanishes in the dusk, and the bar stays open an extra half-hour if the owner feels like company. Rooms without air-conditioning are ovens; choose accommodation that advertises aire acondicionado or at least ceiling fans.

One Bar, One Church, One Big Sky

You could "do" Campillo's streets in forty minutes, but that misses the point. Stay until sunset, when the ridge becomes a viewing platform. Swallows dive between the houses, the cereal fields glow copper, and the horizon stretches far enough to let weather systems parade past like slow-moving floats. Photographers should aim for the track behind the cemetery: no power lines, no rooftops, just land and sky doing what they have done since long before the Romans arrived.

Leave with a jar of rosemary honey bought from the beekeeper's porch (€5, ring the bell if no one's there), and remember the baker's hours. Next Sunday, somewhere in Britain, you can open the jar, smell the plateau, and know that at two o'clock sharp the shutters will still come down, whether visitors come or not.