El Pobo de Dueñas

The thermometer outside the bar reads 8 °C at eleven on an August morning. That’s the first thing that makes visitors blink in El Pobo de Dueñas, a single-street settlement that sits 1,260 m above sea level on the roof of Guadalajara province. While Madrid swelters 130 km to the south-west, the village keeps its windows shut against a breeze that smells of pine resin and sheep.

At this height the surrounding plains of La Mancha turn into high plateaux grazed by fighting bulls, and the air is thin enough to make the church bell sound a semitone higher than it should. Stone houses, the colour of weathered cardboard, line a ridge no wider than a supermarket aisle. From the bench outside the Ayuntamiento you can watch the day’s weather arrive half an hour before it reaches you: first a charcoal stripe on the horizon, then the faint drum of rain on wheat stubble, finally the smell of wet earth climbing the hill like slow incense.

A Village that Forgot to Grow

El Pobo never quite made the leap from medieval stronghold to market town. The head-count hovers around a hundred souls, swollen at weekends by grandchildren from Zaragoza and the odd British couple who mis-read the map and thought they were heading to the other Dueñas near Palencia. What they find is a place that can be crossed on foot in the time it takes to drink a cortado: one upward street, one downward street, and a handful of alleys that stop when they run out of rock.

The buildings make no attempt at grandeur. Walls are cobbled together from local limestone and river boulders, rooflines sag like old cardigans, and every third doorway has been bricked-up to avoid the impuesto de alcabalas once levied on entrances rather than inhabitants. The effect is honest rather than pretty, rather like a farmers’ boot compared to a court shoe.

The only monument that demands attention is the parish church, whose belfry doubles as the village compass. Step through the horseshoe arch and the temperature drops another five degrees; the interior smells of candle wax and the sheep-grazed blankets used to drape the pews in winter. Visits are by arrangement—ask in the tiny museum next door and someone’s aunt will shuffle over with a key the size of a wrench. A couple of euros in the palm speeds things up.

Walking the Sky’s Edge

What the place lacks in museums it returns in horizon. Marked paths strike out across the parameras, the wind-scoured grasslands that stretch east towards Molina de Aragón. The GR-90 long-distance trail brushes the village, but most people content themselves with the 7 km circuit to the abandoned nevera (ice-house) where snow was once compacted into blocks and sledded down to Madrid in time for summer sorbets. The path is obvious, the gradient gentle, and the only hazard is the local livestock: fighting bulls graze freely and have right of way. Walk quietly, keep dogs on leads, and resist the temptation to wave a red anorak.

Spring brings the real spectacle. After the equinox the high plateau erupts into a pointillist canvas of wild tulips, piorno broom and moradillo daisies. Beekeepers move their hives up from the valley for the three-week bloom; jars of the resulting mountain honey, labelled simply miel de páramo, sit on bar counters for €7 a pop. Bring cash—card machines need a mobile signal and the village is in a permanent dead-spot.

Winter Rules

From November to March the province forgets it belongs to temperate Europe. Night thermometers plunge to –12 °C, pipes freeze, and the road from Molina is closed if more than 10 cm of snow sticks. Locals like to say they have two seasons: invierno y domingo de invierno. Yet the cold has its pleasures. Someone will light the chimenea in the bar and serve gachas—a thick porridge of maize flour, pancetta and wild mushrooms—while the television shows yesterday’s football on a loop. On clear nights the Milky Way feels close enough to snag on the church weathervane; the village applied for Dark-Sky status and is waiting for the paperwork to crawl through the regional junta.

Access in winter is strictly DIY. The provincial gritter appears eventually, but four-wheel drive and snow chains live in every boot. If the white stuff is falling, stay put and enjoy the novelty of a Spanish village muffled to library silence.

What Passes for a Menu

Food is built around what can be grown above 1,000 m: lamb, pulses, bread, and whatever the hunter brings home. The bar La Posada keeps no written menu; ask what’s on and the reply is usually “cordero o cordero”. The lamb is slow-roasted in a wood-fired oven until the bones can be squeezed like toothpaste, then served on a pewter plate with chips that soak up the gravy. Vegetarians get migas—fried breadcrumbs laced with garlic, grapes and scraps of jamón that can be picked out if principles permit. Pudding is té de montes, a sweet infusion made from dried rock-rose petals that tastes like faintly perfumed tea.

Wine comes from Valdejalón, an hour east, and is sold by the porrón at €2.50 a glass. It is light enough to drink at lunch and still walk the ridge afterwards, though the altitude does the head no favours.

Timing the Trip

The village makes no attempt to entertain you. Turn up on a Monday outside school holidays and you will find shuttered houses, one bored dog and a notice on the church door advising you to ring a number that nobody answers. Life re-starts on Thursday evening when the weekenders arrive to chop logs and complain about Madrid rents. Friday and Saturday the bar opens properly, someone strums a guitar, and the plaza smells of charcoal and rosemary.

Festivity is concentrated into two short bursts. The main fiesta, honouring the Virgen de la Soledad, falls on the second weekend of September and involves processions, an outdoor paella for 200, and a disco that finishes when the generator runs out of diesel. More photogenic is the Fuego de San Antón on 17 January: bonfires are lit on the ridge at dusk, the lights are switched off, and the village appears to float on a necklace of embers.

If you need organised fun, time your visit for mid-August when the neighbouring town of Molina stages its medieval combat re-enactment. El Pobo empties as everyone decamps to watch grown men thwack each other with foam swords; accommodation doubles in price and rooms sell out months ahead. The village itself offers no beds, so base yourself in Molina or bring a tent and ask one of the farmers if you can pitch behind a barn. Most will shrug and say “cuidado con los toros”—mind the bulls.

Getting There, Getting Out

The drive from Madrid takes two and a quarter hours via the A-2 and the N-211 to Molina de Aragón, then 19 km of minor road that corkscrews upward through wheat and rosemary. Fill the tank in Molina; the village has no petrol station and the nearest supermarket is 35 km away. Public transport is theoretical: a weekday bus links Molina to Guadalajara at 07:05 and returns at 19:30. Miss it and you are hitch-hiking through land where cars appear every twenty minutes, if at all.

Phone coverage is patchy even by Spanish standards—Vodafone roams on a Moroccan carrier up here—so download an offline map and expect to navigate by church tower and the position of the sun. The road is ploughed after snow, but keep chains in the boot between December and March all the same.

The Honest Verdict

El Pobo de Dueñas will not change your life. It offers no souvenir shops, no Instagram pier, no boutique hotel. What it does provide is a crash course in high-plateau Spain: the sound of wind through sabina branches, the smell of oak smoke on a July night, the realisation that half the country still lives by the sun and the seasons. Come if you are content with your own company, if you remember to bring cash and a jacket, and if you can see the merit in a place whose main evening attraction is counting shooting stars from the church steps. Arrive expecting theme-packet medieval and you will leave within the hour. Arrive prepared for silence and you may find yourself staying for supper, then breakfast, then the slow walk up the ridge to watch tomorrow’s weather roll in.