Hoya-Gonzalo

At 930 metres, the air thins just enough to make the horizon look scrubbed. From the church tower the cereal plains roll out like a corrugated roof, their colours shifting from mint-green after rain to biscuit-dust by July. This is Hoya Gonzalo, a single-street Albacete village that most sat-navs still mis-place, and where the loudest evening sound is usually grain lorries changing gear on the CM-412.

The Village that Left the Meter Running

Six hundred-odd souls live here, give or take the sons and daughters who return only for the August fiestas. Their houses are the colour of fresh yoghurt, woodwork picked out in oxidised green, front doors wide enough to admit a mule but now sheltering small Fiats. Peek through the rejas and you will see the original wine cellars—hand-hewn caves under the living-room floor where the temperature sits at 14 °C whatever the meseta is doing outside. Almost all are private, so the most you will manage is a polite nod from an owner who may, if you ask in Spanish, flick on the light so you can glimpse the soot-black ceiling.

There is no ticket office, no interpretive centre, no guided walk. Instead you get a grid of four parallel streets that take twenty minutes to master, plus a plaza where elderly men still play dominoes with tiles worn to ivory. The parish church keeps its doors unlocked; inside, the air smells of wax and the stone floors bow gently from centuries of footfall. Climb the tower (ask for the sacristán in the house opposite) and you can see the Sierra de Alcaraz thirty kilometres west, a bruise-coloured ridge that catches the afternoon storms.

Working Fields, Open Roads

Leave the tarmac and the modern century peels away quickly. Farm tracks radiate towards neighbouring villages—Bonete, Peñas de San Pedro—forming a 25-kilometre loop that cyclists can knock off before lunch, provided they carry two bottles; the only fountain is back in Hoya Gonzalo. Walkers usually head south along the Cañada Real de la Vizana, a drove road wide enough for fifty sheep abreast, now carpeted with poppies in April and almond blossom in February.

The Monte Ibérico begins where the last barley field gives up. It is not dramatic—no limestone cliffs or bragging summits—yet the gain of 300 metres is enough to attract booted Spaniards after wild asparagus in spring and red-legged partridge in October. Signage is unofficial: a cairn here, a spray-painted stripe on a holm oak there. If that sounds casual, remember the whole comarca has fewer residents than a medium-sized Leeds estate; getting lost is difficult, getting lonely easy.

Mobile reception drops to 3G within ten minutes of the last farmhouse. Download your offline map while you still have four bars.

What Arrives on the Back of a Lorry

Hoya Gonzalo produces wheat, almonds and the odd temperamental vineyard, but it imports almost everything else. That includes restaurant customers: the single bar, La Reja, opens at seven for coffee, shuts at three, and may or may not reopen depending on how late the owner was up the previous night. If you find the metal shutter down, plan B is to drive fifteen minutes to Bonete where Pensión El Botijo dishes out gazpachos manchegos—a thick game-and-tortilla stew, nothing to do with chilled tomato soup—and litres of house tinto for €9 a plate.

Self-catering is safer. The village shop sells UHT milk, tinned peppers and locally milled flour that still contains weevils. Serious provisioning happens in Almansa, half an hour east, where Carrefone stocks cheddar for the homesick and porridge oats in February. Back in the cottage kitchen you can attempt migas—fried breadcrumbs with chorizo—though most British visitors admit defeat after the second kilo of oil.

Wine is the exception to the import rule. Bodegas El Tanino, two kilometres outside the village limits, presses Monastrell and Tempranillo at altitudes that keep the alcohol down to a civilised 13 %. Ring a day ahead and someone will unlock the tasting room; English is patchy, so brush up on the phrase “solo un poquito más” unless you fancy a four-glass breakfast.

Seasons that Make Their Own Rules

Come too early and the plateau is Siberian. January nights regularly fall below –5 °C; the fountain ices over, and even the dogs negotiate the streets with caution. April flips the switch: fields green up overnight, shepherds exchange quilted coats for straw hats, and the first swallows career through the streets like drunken Spitfires. By late May thermometers touch 30 °C at midday, but the altitude still lets you sleep under a duvet.

August is for fiestas and family reunions. The population triples, the plaza hosts a makeshift disco powered by speakers the size of hay bales, and someone inevitably drives a tractor through the fairy lights. Book accommodation now or you will be pitching a tent among the almond trees. October brings the cereal drill and the smell of freshly turned soil; nights turn sharp, morning mist pools in the hollows, and the village reverts to its quiet winter self.

Snow? Every three or four years a dusting arrives, enough to close the CM-412 for a morning and send children scraping sledges along the farm lanes. It rarely lingers beyond lunchtime, but the wind that follows can knife through a Barbour like Yorkshire fog.

How to Get Here, and Why You Might Not Bother

Alicante airport is 145 kilometres away, mostly on the A-31 dual-carriageway that empties after Murcia. Madrid takes half an hour longer but the roads are faster; either way you will need a hire car because buses stopped calling here in 2011. Petrol stations accept UK cards without the 30 € minimum common in remoter parts of Andalucía, yet keep some coins handy for the almond sellers at the inland toll.

Accommodation is limited to one large villa—Casa Spa Don Gonzalo—sleeping seventeen, with an indoor pool that smells faintly of bromine and a jacuzzi that rattles like a cement mixer after ten pm. At €250 a night for the whole house it is cheap if you arrive in a group, cavernous if you do not. Smaller cottages exist but owners advertise only on Spanish sites; expect to negotiate by WhatsApp and pay a 25 % deposit into a Spanish bank whose website times out when you try the translated version.

The Honest Verdict

Hoya Gonzalo will never compete with the Alpujarras or the Cotswolds-in-the-sun belt of Mojácar. It offers no artisan gin, no craft brewery, no Sunday supplement tick-box. What it does give you is a slice of inland Spain before the Instagram filters: a place where grain prices are discussed more eagerly than house prices, and where the evening entertainment is watching the swifts dive-bomb the church tower while you decide whether to open a second bottle of four-euro red.

Turn up expecting undiscovered perfection and you will drive away after lunch. Arrive prepared for thin menus, thick silence and skies the size of East Anglia, and you might stay long enough to understand why some villages do not need saving—they just need visitors who can handle the volume turned down to two.