Castillejo de Iniesta

The morning mist clings to cereal fields at 820 metres, and the only sound is a single tractor grinding through distant furrows. Castillejo de Iniesta wakes slowly, its stone houses shuttered against the plateau wind that sweeps across Castilla-La Mancha's eastern edge. This is Spain's high vacuum – a village of 115 souls where the land starts to tilt gently towards the Cuenca hills and the silence feels almost geological.

Drive the A-3 from Valencia towards Madrid and you will pass the turning almost by accident. The service area signs appear first: fuel, coffee, the obligatory Autogrill. Most traffic accelerates past, bound for the coast or the capital. Those who swing off discover a settlement stretched along a ridge, neither picture-postcard nor abandoned, simply functioning at its own altitude-adjusted pace.

The Arithmetic of Altitude

Eight hundred metres changes everything. Summers remain fierce – this is still La Mancha – but nights drop to 16 °C even in July, making sleep possible without the air-con Madrid swears by. Winters sharpen; snow arrives perhaps twice each year, enough to cut the road for an afternoon and send children scavenging for cardboard sledges. Spring arrives two weeks later than Cuenca city, 70 km to the north-east, and autumn lingers long enough for morning walks through stubble that crackles like brittle newspaper.

The village layout follows the ridge line. Houses face south to harvest light, their Arab-tiled roofs weighted against the wind. Back lanes fall away sharply; a five-minute stroll north brings you to the cemetery where the plateau suddenly opens into a bowl of wheat and vineyards. From here the eye measures distance by the shrinking size of farmsteads until the horizon meets a sky that, after rain, achieves a metallic blue unknown to lower altitudes.

Walking the Dry Lanes

No glossy route maps exist. Instead, set out on the camino that leaves from the church door, skirt past the last vegetable plots, and within ten minutes you are among grain fields the colour of lions' coats. The track forks at an abandoned threshing circle; bear right and you loop back in ninety minutes via an irrigation channel now used only by larks. Bear left and the path drifts towards the ruined cortijo of Los Llanos, its roof beams long since hacked out for firewood yet walls still straight enough to provide lunch-time shade.

Serious hikers link these threads into a day-circuit south to the salt spring at Huete, 18 km on farm tracks. Mobile reception vanishes after the second kilometre; download offline maps before leaving. Spring and late autumn give the best walking window – April green, November stubble – though February can gift a week of crisp, cloudless days when the sierra snowcaps float like cut-outs against the sky.

What Passes for Gastronomy

Expect no gastro-temples. The Autogrill beside the motorway does a respectable menú del día at €12 (£10.50) – salad, grilled chicken, chips, plastic cup of La Mancha wine – and has clean loos, the real reason most travellers stop. In the village itself, Hotel La Estrella opens its dining room to non-guests if you telephone before 11 a.m.; the cooking is grandmother-level, heavy on game stews in season, lighter on vegetables unless you count the chickpeas in gazpacho manchego (a hot meat broth poured over flat bread, nothing to do with Andalusian tomato soup).

For self-caterers, the nearest supermarket is 17 km away in Iniesta – stock up before you arrive. The village shop closed five years ago when the owners retired; what remains is a weekly van that sells bread, tins and washing powder from the main square on Thursday mornings. Queue with the locals, practise your Spanish numbers, and remember: siesta starts at 14:00 sharp.

When the Village Parties

August brings the fiesta patronal, three days when the population triples. Emigrants return from Valencia, Barcelona, even London, pitching tents in almond groves while grandparents reclaim ancestral bedrooms. A sound system appears on the basketball court, playing reggaeton until the Guardia Civil remind organisers of the 03:00 curfew. The procession is short – priest, brass band, statue of the Virgin carried by eight men who learned the rhythm at their fathers' knees – but the wine flows freely and outsiders who attempt a polite refusal are over-ruled.

October belongs to the agricultural cycle. The first rains soften the soil for planting wheat; tractors work headlights-on at dawn while buzzards gather behind the plough. If you wander out at this hour you will meet Don José checking furrows with a spirit level older than Spain's democracy. He will explain, slowly and without eye contact, why the land must breathe before seed meets earth. Listen; no guidebook replicates the lecture.

Staying Over: the Limited Options

Hotel La Estrella offers twelve rooms, all exterior, none particularly stylish. Doubles cost €55 (£48) including breakfast – instant coffee, packaged croissant, freshly squeezed orange juice if the trees are producing. Walls are thin; request the second floor to avoid hearing every chair scrape in the restaurant. Wi-Fi reaches the landing but rarely the bedrooms; consider this a feature, not a bug.

Alternative strategy: base yourself in Cuenca or Valencia and visit as a day trip. The drive from either city takes under ninety minutes, allowing you to walk the lanes, eat lunch, photograph the cemetery view, and still reach civilisation before dark. Winter visitors should carry snow chains; sudden squalls can whiten the road between motorway exit and village in twenty minutes.

The Honest Verdict

Castillejo de Iniesta will never star on a Spanish tourism poster. It lacks the chocolate-box balconies of Cuenca's hanging houses, the wine-boutique allure of La Rioja, even the ghost-town frisson of nearby Belinchón. What it offers instead is altitude-adjusted clarity: a place where geography still dictates behaviour, where lunch is taken at 14:00 because the sun says so, and where the night sky remains unpolluted by anything brighter than a farmer's torch.

Come for the silence, the ridge-top walks, the shock of seeing cereal fields merge seamlessly with sky. Leave before you start counting the empty houses, before the Autogrill coffee begins to taste like home. This is Spain's empty quarter, and its greatest luxury is space – briefly available to anyone prepared to climb 820 metres and switch off their phone.