Torremochuela

The wheat stops swaying when the car engine cuts out. Nothing replaces it except the wind and, if you listen long enough, the soft clang of a loose iron balcony knocking against stone. Torremochuela sits that quietly at 1 169 m, high on the southern edge of the Sistema Ibérico, eight permanent neighbours sharing a ridge with a handful of goats and whatever birds of prey are riding the thermals that morning. You will not find a souvenir shop; you will not even find a bar. What you will find is a textbook example of how Castilian villages once organised themselves: a church, a communal bread oven, thick-walled houses built back-to-back against winter, and streets just wide enough for a mule and its owner.

Stone, adobe and the horizon

Every building in the hamlet is either stone quarried from the ridge or adobe brick sun-baked on the spot. Walls are a metre thick, windows are small, roofs pitch steeply enough to shrug off snow. The overall colour scheme is the same one Céanne liked so much: ochre plaster turning salmon in late afternoon, grey limestone picking up the first light of dawn. Nothing rises higher than the single-tier belfry of the parish church except the grain silo outside town, a concrete pencil that locals call “the tower” and that gives Torremochuela its name—literally “little tower of the wheat fields.”

A slow circuit takes twenty minutes if you keep walking, forty if you stop to read the hand-painted house names: Casa Roque, Casa del Pino, Casa de la Tía Fefa. Most doors are locked; the owners live in Guadalajara or Madrid and only return for the August fiestas. A few have been bought by painters and engineers looking for silence. One British weekender installed solar panels and left them—useful, because the village is off the national grid and electricity arrives by overhead wire strung across the plateau. Mobile reception is equally provisional: EE works on the north side of the churchyard, Vodafone on the south, nothing at all if a cloud decides to sit down.

Walking into nothing much, and liking it

The pleasure here is in covering ground without agenda. Sheep tracks radiate across the cereal steppe, meeting old drove roads that once took cattle south to Teruel. A thirty-minute stroll south-east drops you into the Barranco del Manchón, a limestone trench where wild marjoram grows waist-high and ibex sometimes appear on the opposite cliff. Continue another hour and you reach an abandoned shepherd’s hut with a stone corral; bring water, because there are no fountains after the village trough.

Spring brings purple flashes of Viola demetria; June turns the fields gold; October smells of thyme and damp flint. In winter the plateau can lie under fifteen centimetres of snow, beautiful but tricky. The regional government grits the CL-211 eventually, yet a four-wheel drive or snow chains are sensible from December to March. When the white stuff melts the mud becomes axle-deep; wellies live in every car boot for a reason.

Where to eat, sleep and fill the tank

Torremochuela itself offers zero hospitality, so plan to be self-contained. The last reliable petrol is in Prados Redondos, five kilometres back down the hill. Molina de Aragón, twenty minutes north by the HU-211, has two small supermarkets, a Friday market famous for local lamb, and a handful of no-frills restaurants. Casa Ramón does migas—fried breadcrumbs laced with garlic and chorizo—for €9; ask for the “sin picante” version if you dislike heat. The nearest beds are in the same town: Hostal el Molino has doubles from €45, heating included—nights up here drop below 10 °C even in July.

Wild camping is tolerated if you keep below the ridge line and take your litter out. Fires are banned April-October; a Calor gas stove saves hassle. The only picnic tables are inside the village, under the pines by the playground, so bring a folding chair if you want to watch the sun vanish into the meseta with a cup of tea in hand.

The fiesta that almost isn’t

Every year on the third weekend of August the population swells to roughly sixty. The priest drives over from Molina, mass is held in the church at 11 a.m., and afterwards someone produces a paella pan the diameter of a cartwheel. Visitors who turn up unannounced are welcomed, handed a plate, and quizzed politely about where they came from and how on earth they found the place. Music is an old Bluetooth speaker balanced on a stone bench; dancing stops when the battery dies. By 6 p.m. the crowd thins, cars trailing dust back towards Madrid, and the village subsides into its usual hush.

The catch

Isolation is Torremochuela’s selling point and its drawback. There is no chemist, no cashpoint, no bus, and the single public phone was removed in 2012. If the wind topples a power pole you may wait a day for the engineer. Cloud can swallow the plateau for hours, turning a gentle walk into a navigation test. Bring layers, water, offline maps, and enough fuel to retreat the way you came.

Nor should you expect twee picture-postcard Spain. The place is scrubby, the architecture plain, the landscape big rather than pretty. What it offers instead is space measured by the hour and silence you can feel in your chest. Stand on the ridge at dusk, look south over charcoal folds of land that do not stop until Valencia, and it becomes clear why eight people still call this fragment of Castile home—and why, after a day of nothing much happening, you might almost envy them.