Mochales

The sheep turn their heads as one when the car door slams. Forty pairs of eyes track your progress up the single street of Mochales, population forty on a good day, elevation 978 metres above the nearest sea you’ll find. By the time you’ve reached the church wall, the flock has lost interest and returned to stripping the sparse grass between limestone boulders. That’s the pace here: curiosity, assessment, acceptance, all before you’ve dug your map from your rucksack.

High Plains, Hard Silence

This is not the Spain of guidebook covers. No orange trees, no flamenco bars, no tiled benches for selfies. Mochales sits on the roof of the Sistema Ibérico, where Castilla-La Mancha tips into what used to be the Kingdom of Aragón. The air is thinner, the sun sharper, the nights cold enough to make you regret leaving the extra jumper in the boot. Winters bring snow that can cut the village off for a day or two; summers are warm but never stifling, thanks to the altitude. Spring arrives late—mid-April instead of March—and autumn is a brief, fierce burst of thyme-scented yellows before the first frost.

The landscape around the village is a textbook example of paramera: rolling limestone moorland gouged by dry gullies, dotted with juniper and savin. Walk five minutes beyond the last house and the only sounds are wind, your own breathing and, if you’re lucky, the distant clang of a sheep bell. Golden eagles ride the thermals overhead; you’ll need binoculars and patience to spot them, but they’re there. This isn’t a nature reserve with hides and information boards—just open country that happens to belong to wild things.

Stone That Outlasted People

Mochales grew when wool was money. Thick-walled houses, barely two storeys high, were built to keep heat in during six-month winters and to use every scrap of local stone. Many roofs have collapsed; some façades have been patched with cement the colour of stale toast. Yet the place feels lived-in, not abandoned. A neat stack of firewood by a door, a hand-written notice for the August fiesta taped to a shutter, the faint smell of woodsmoke slipping from a chimney—all reminders that the census may be tiny but the pulse still beats.

The parish church stands at the top of the slope, its bell-tower more functional than pretty. Inside, the single nave is plain except for a seventeenth-century retablo gilded with gold leaf flaking like sunburnt skin. Mass is held once a week; if the door is locked, ask at house number 14—María keeps the key and will open up if she’s finished feeding her hens.

Walking Without Waymarks

There are paths, but you’ll need an OS-style map or GPS track. One route drops south-east to the abandoned hamlet of Villar de Cobeta, three kilometres of gentle descent along an old drove road. Another climbs north to the ridge at 1,250 metres for views that stretch, on a clear day, to the Moncayo massif in Aragón. Neither route is waymarked beyond the occasional faded paint splash, and phone signal vanishes within the first kilometre. Take water—there are no fountains—and don’t trust the olive-green line on Google Maps; it once guided a pair of German hikers straight into a ravine deep enough to swallow a tractor.

What You Won’t Find (and Might Miss)

No shop. No bar. No ATM, no petrol station, no souvenir fridge magnets. The nearest coffee is twelve kilometres away in Molina de Aragón, a small provincial town whose medieval castle makes a decent consolation prize on the drive back. Bring everything you plan to eat: bread, cheese, tinned fish, a couple of beers and a knife sharp enough to slice jamón on a wall. Locals will nod approval if you offer to share; refuse, and they’ll shrug and leave you to it.

Accommodation is scattered across the surrounding hills rather than in the village itself. Loft Rural LaCalata, five minutes down the hill by car, has underfloor heating and picture windows looking over the Entrepeñas reservoir—luxury after a day on the paramera. Prices start around €90 per night for two, including firewood. Closer to Molina, the stone cottage Casa Arriazu offers simpler rooms from €65; owners José and Pilar will lend walking notes photocopied from a 1994 hiking club newsletter, still accurate apart from the bit about the bridge that washed away in 2007.

Calendar of the Stubborn

The fiesta patronal is held around 15 August, when the population swells to perhaps 120. Visitors sleep in cousins’ houses, in vans, or under the stars with sleeping bags and a tolerance for snoring strangers. Events are low-key: evening mass, a communal paella cooked over pine branches, a raffle whose top prize is usually a ham and whose tickets are €2 each. Music comes from a single speaker balanced on a bar stool; dancing lasts until the generator runs out of petrol, normally around 2 a.m. If you arrive expecting processions of Moors and Christians, you’ll be disappointed. If you bring a bottle of decent gin and a willingness to wash dishes, you’ll be family for the night.

Getting Here, Getting Out

From Madrid, take the A-2 east to Zaragoza, peel off at km 118 signed Molina de Aragón, then follow the CM-2106 for another 45 minutes of empty, perfectly surfaced road. Total driving time is two and a half hours—unless winter snow drifts across the pass, in which case add an hour and carry chains. There is no public transport; the last bus that dared the route was cancelled in 2011 when subsidies dried up. Car hire at Madrid-Barajas starts around £25 a day for a Fiat 500; spend the extra tenner on a diesel with decent ground clearance, because the final kilometre into Mochales is a concrete track pitted like a teenager’s complexion.

Worth It?

Only if you’re comfortable with your own thoughts. Mochales offers landscape, solitude, and a crash course in how rural Spain copes when the young leave and the old stay. Come for the walking, the night sky punched full of stars, the realisation that forty people can keep a village alive if they refuse to surrender. Don’t come for Michelin stars, boutique shopping, or Instagram backdrops—sheep make terrible influencers.