Valtablado del Río

The Taguillo stream is barely a hand’s width when it reaches the stone bridge on the village edge, yet every house in Valtablado del Río still turns towards it. Water is spoken of in the plural here—las aguas—as though the word itself were a spell against the 844-metre Alcarrian plateau drying to biscuit in April wind. Eight permanent neighbours, one parish priest who drives up on Sundays, and a flock of resident swifts: that is the census.

Why the map still bothers

Most motorists sweep past the CM-2015 turn-off between Checa and Honrubia, fooled by the empty horizon. Those who swing north meet a single-track road that corkscrews up through holm-oak and knee-high rosemary. The tarmac stops pretending to be two-way after the second cattle grid; wing-mirror foliage scratches a polite warning that you are now the intruder. Suddenly the slope flattens, stone walls replace wire fences, and the village materialises—no dramatic reveal, just a tight grid of grey houses clamped to the rock. Parking is wherever the veranda of your choice happens to be empty; leave the nose of the car pointing downhill for an easier getaway and walk.

Walking into a sound archive

Inside the settlement the loudest noise is your own soles on granite setts. The houses are built shoulder-to-shoulder, their timber doors the colour of weathered whisky crates. Knock and you will discover half are unlocked only by swallows. Peer through the iron grille of number 14 and you see an internal patio where a stone basin still holds last month’s rain; someone’s great-grandfather carved the year 1893 into the lip. Keep strolling and the calle becomes a path, the path becomes a sheep track, and twenty minutes later you are on the ridge with the whole Tagus basin spilled out like a rumpled cloth. April brings sheets of purple phlomis intercut with wild peonies; October turns the broom the colour of burnt marmalade. Either month delivers a UV index that will fry Anglo-Saxon skin before you have finished your sandwich—pack cream, not just hope.

A church without a queue

The Church of the Nativity squats at the top rather than the centre, as though it had started life as a defensive keep. Its belfry is a single slit, more loophole than bell-tower, and the west wall still carries ochre traces of Romanesque paint. The door is unlocked; inside, the temperature drops ten degrees and the air smells of extinguished candles and cold iron. No explanatory panels, no donation QR code, just a 17th-century pine retablo whose blues have oxidised to seaweed green. If you want music, wait for the swifts to re-enter through the broken clerestory—they dive-bomb the nave at dusk like feathered metronomes.

Eating: what to expect when there is no menu

There is no bar, no shop, no petrol pump. The last baker retired in 1998 and bread now arrives in the boot of a neighbour who collects it frozen from a supermarket in Guadalajara. Self-catering is the norm; bring supplies or phone María (she owns the only inhabited house with a green balcony) the day before and she will sell you a kilo of chorizo from Priego—mild, almost sweet, sliced thick enough to bend without snapping. If you are invited inside, accept the offer of gazpacho manchego; it arrives as a rabbit-and-partridge stew thickened with flat-bread, nothing like the cold tomato soup British supermarkets label “gazpacho”. Eat fast—the ceramic bowl keeps cooking the broth and mutton fat solidifies if you dither.

A pair of walks that fit the daylight

From the church door a farm track heads north-east along a dry-stone wall. Forty-five minutes of gentle gradient brings you to an abandoned threshing circle; grain was trodden here by mules until the 1960s and the stone floor still smells of straw when the sun hits it. Turn left and a faint path drops to the Taguillo pools—knee-deep, crystal, cold enough to make you gasp after the plateau heat. Trainers suffice; boots are overkill unless you insist on dignity.

The second ramble is longer and needs navigation. Drive five minutes back down the CM-2015, park at the picnic clearing signed “Fuente de la Tejera”, and follow the green-and-white waymarks of the GR-86 long-distance path south. The route climbs 300 metres through umbrella pine, then bursts onto the paramera—a treeless prairie where calcarenite boulders balance like failed Stonehenge experiments. Griffin vultures cruise at eye level; if you sit still they will bank to inspect you, casting shadows the size of coffee tables. Allow three hours there-and-back, carry at least a litre of water per person, and start early—afternoon thermals turn the trail into a sand-blaster.

When the village remembers how to party

The fiesta calendar hinges on 8 September, birthday of the Virgin whose name the church carries. Descendants who left for Madrid or Zaragoza in the 1970s drive up the night before, string bulbs between houses and fire up a paella pan the diameter of a wagon wheel. Visitors are welcome but there is no programme; events happen when enough people gather. Mass begins whenever the priest finishes his coffee, followed by a communal meal in the schoolyard—long tables, paper tablecloths, bottomless tinto de verano. If you plan to stay, book the lone rural cottage months ahead; otherwise your nearest bed is in Checa, 25 minutes down a road you will not fancy driving after a third refill of wine.

The honest season guide

April delivers the greenest hills and the rudest meteorological shocks—14 wet days, hail the size of lentils, yet afternoons that hit 26 °C. October is kinder: six days of rain, gold light, night temperatures hovering around freezing but midday highs of 29 °C. Winter is surprisingly busy with Spanish photographers chasing the hoar-frost that feathers abandoned threshing boards; snow is rare but ice polish turns the cobbles into a rink—bring pull-on studs. August is simply hot, still and lonely; even the swifts look bored.

Getting here, getting out

Fly Stansted to Madrid-Barajas (2 h 15 min), pick up a hire car in Terminal 1 and point it east on the A-2. Turn north on the CM-101 at Guadalajara, then west on the CM-2015; total driving time is under two hours, toll-free. There is no bus, no taxi rank, no Uber. Petrol at Guadalajara is the last cheap fuel—top up. Mobile coverage dies in the final valley, so download your maps before the cattle grid. When you leave, the plateau will look smaller in the mirror; the silence, strangely, travels with you—ringing faintly, like the after-tone of the church bell that nobody bothered to ring.