Gabaldón

The thermometer drops six degrees between Cuenca and the final climb to Gabaldón. At 900 metres the air thins enough to notice if you've driven up from the coast that morning, and the cereal plains that looked flat from below reveal a rippled, muscular geography. This is still La Mancha, but the region's trademark table-top horizon has buckled into low pine ridges that hide the next village only fifteen kilometres away.

One hundred and fifty people live behind the stone church that blocks the main square. Their houses are the colour of local limestone, trimmed with blue or green woodwork that photographs well at the end of the afternoon when the walls turn butter-yellow. There are no souvenir shops, no brown heritage signs, no ticket booths. The only working bar doubles as the grocery, opens at seven for coffee and closes when the owner feels like it. Bring cash – the card machine broke in 2019 and nobody has rushed to replace it.

Walking without waymarks

Gabaldón's appeal is the territory that begins where the asphalt ends. Farm tracks strike out in four directions, climbing through stone-pine and kermes oak to crests that give 40-kilometre views across La Manchuela. None of the paths are signed; all are public. Locals still use them to reach scattered almond plots or to check hunting snares, so the ground underfoot is compacted and easy to follow until the first heavy rains of autumn wash new gullies across the surface.

A sensible circuit starts opposite the cemetery, follows the ridge above the Arroyo de la Hoz for ninety minutes, then drops back to the village along the irrigation channel that once fed three mills. Spring brings the best light – the cereal greens vibrate against red soil – and the temperature hovers in the low twenties, perfect for carrying nothing more than water and a windproof. In July and August the mercury can touch 35 °C by eleven o'clock; walking is restricted to the two hours after dawn when the only sound is the hum of bees in the thyme.

Birdlife is modest but constant: crested larks on the wire, short-toed eagles circling high enough to look like glider pilots, the occasional hoopoe flashing its zebra wings across the path. Serious twitchers tend to push on to the rugged sickle of the Serranía de Cuenca an hour north, yet even beginners can log thirty species here between breakfast and lunch.

What passes for a menu

There is no restaurant. If the bar's shutters are up you can buy a toasted baguette with tomato and olive oil for €2.50, or a plate of local cheese whose name changes according to whichever shepherd delivered wheels that week. The nearest supermarket is twenty-five minutes away in Landete; the sensible strategy is to stock up in Cuenca before leaving the A-40.

Regional cooking survives inside private kitchens. On feast days the women of the village still prepare gazpacho manchego – nothing to do with Andalucía's cold soup, but a game-and-paprika stew thickened with flatbread and eaten steaming from earthenware bowls. An invitation is unlikely unless you have a mutual acquaintance, yet it does happen if you return often enough to become a familiar face.

Water emerges from a stone fountain at the top of Calle Real and tastes of iron. Bring a bottle; the calcium content is high enough to fur up a kettle but perfectly drinkable.

When the village refills

For three days around the third weekend of August Gabaldón grows from 151 to 800. The fiestas honour the Assumption of Mary with a brass band imported from Cuenca, a paella cooked in a pan two metres wide, and a boules tournament that finishes well after midnight under floodlights powered by a throbbing generator. Former residents who left for Madrid or Valencia in the 1970s park their hire cars along the one proper street and argue about whose grandfather built which wall. Rooms are not for rent; visitors sleep on sofas or pitch tents behind cousins' houses. If you insist on a mattress, book early in Landete or drive back to the Cuenca ring road where functional hotels charge €55–€75 for a double with Wi-Fi that actually reaches the bedroom.

Outside August the calendar is quiet. The parish priest visits every second Sunday; a mobile library parks outside the town hall on Wednesdays; the doctor holds surgery once a week in the same room where the voting booths are erected for elections. Otherwise the village follows an agricultural rhythm set 800 metres closer to the stars than Madrid.

Getting there, getting out

The CM-2105 leaves the N-320 at Villalba de la Sierra and wriggles 45 kilometres over two passes before dropping into Gabaldón. The asphalt is good but narrow; meeting a tractor around a blind bend keeps the drive interesting. In winter the road is cleared after snow, yet ice can linger on the northern slopes: carry chains between December and February. From London the sensible route is Stansted to Valencia, pick up a hire car, and allow two and a half hours west on the A-3 and CV-485. Petrol stations are scarce after Utiel – fill the tank.

Buses exist on Tuesday and Friday only, departing Cuenca at 14:15 and returning at 06:30 the next day. The timetable suits pensioners with medical appointments, not holidaymakers. Miss the Friday return and you wait sixty kilometres on the pavement until Tuesday.

Mobile reception is patchy. Vodafone and Orange pick up a weak 4G signal near the church; Movistar users walk to the cemetery ridge for one bar. The village Wi-Fi password is written on the bar blackboard and works until eleven each evening, when the router is switched off to save electricity.

The honest verdict

Gabaldón will not change your life. It offers no Insta-moment façade, no boutique conversion of a medieval convent, no chef interpreting migas through a foam gun. What it does provide is altitude without effort, silence that is broken only by wind and distant dogs, and the mildly thrilling sense that the twenty-first century has loosened its grip. Come for one night and you may wonder why you bothered; stay for three and the lowering of blood pressure becomes measurable. Book a room elsewhere, fill the boot with supplies, and treat the place like a base camp rather than a destination. If that sounds like work, pick the Costa Blanca instead. If it sounds like breathing space, set the sat-nav for 900 metres and climb.