Laguna del Marquesado

The evening bus from Cuenca carries one passenger beyond the last irrigation channel. It drops him beside a stone cross, turns in the road with a three-point manoeuvre that takes longer than the village stroll, and rumbles back downhill. By the time the tail-lights disappear, Laguna del Marquesado has already closed its single street for the night. Forty-eight residents, two dogs, no streetlights. At this altitude the air thins and sharpens; every footstep sounds like an intrusion.

Stone, pine and the sound of altitude

Houses here are built for December. Walls are sixty centimetres thick, roofs steep enough to shrug off snow, chimneys fat enough to swallow whole trunks of pine. The stone is local, a warm grey that turns honey-coloured when the low sun hits it, which happens only after eleven in mid-winter; the village sits so high that dawn drags itself over the eastern ridge. Timber balconies are shallow, practical things where firewood is stacked higher than the guard rail. Nothing is decorative, everything is insulation.

Walk to the upper lane and the settlement ends abruptly. A cattle grid, a pine trunk rubbed smooth by decades of harnesses, then the track dissolves into the forest. This is the boundary between inhabited Spain and the Serranía Alta, a tract of laricio pine and juniper that stretches north until it meets the cliffs of the Júcar gorge. Corzo – roe deer – feed at first light; wild boar root up the verges after rain. The only reliable company is the sound of wind moving through resinous needles, a noise like distant surf.

What passes for a centre

There is no plaza mayor, merely a widening where two gradients meet. On one side the church, locked except for Saturday evening mass at seven; on the other the former school, its bell still in place though classes ended in 1978. A wooden bench, a noticeboard bleached unreadable, and a drinking fountain that runs all year because the pipe is buried deeper than the frost line. That is it. No café, no shop, no ATM. If you need milk you drive twenty minutes to Cañete; if you need cash you should have withdrawn it in Cuenca.

The absence of commerce is not picturesque – it is simply the arithmetic of altitude. When snow blocks the CM-2106 for three days running, the only commerce that matters is the pile of logs under the balcony. Residents keep freezers in Cuenca garages and haul supplies up when the weather forecast promises a window. They shop monthly, not daily, and they laugh when visitors ask where the baker’s van stops. “The baker is your own kitchen,” one woman explains, sliding a tray of gachas manchegas – peppery semolina porridge – into a wood-fired oven that has been warming since five a.m.

Tracks made for hooves, not hiking boots

Maps show a spider-web of dotted lines radiating from the village. These are cañadas reales – drove roads older than any modern frontier – used until the 1960s to move sheep between winter pasture in La Mancha and summer grazing on the Parameras de Molina. Today they serve weekend cattle, the occasional 4×4 of the forestry service, and walkers content with simple orientation. Waymarking is discreet: a stripe of orange paint on a pine trunk, a cairn where two tracks fork. Mobile signal vanishes within three hundred metres; download the IGN 1:25,000 sheet before leaving home.

A gentle introduction is the loop south to the ruined snow wells, icehouses where winter drifts were compacted and sold to city hospitals in the days before refrigeration. The walk is six kilometres, gains only 180 metres, and returns along the ridge used by smugglers during the post-war charcoal trade. Allow two hours, longer if you stop to watch griffon vultures circling on thermals that rise from the warm limestone.

For something sterner, follow the drove road north-east to the lagoon that gives the village its misleading name. La Laguna is not a swimmable lake but a seasonal wetland cupped in a limestone depression; even in May it can be a skim of turquoise edged with cotton-grass. The track drops 400 metres in three kilometres, then climbs back out. In winter the slope holds snow long after the village street is clear; carry lightweight traction aids if you plan to go beyond the first pass.

Eating when no one is selling

Restaurants lie eight kilometres away in Huerta del Marquesado, a metropolis of 160 souls. Restaurante La Fuente opens every lunch time and most evenings; ring before 11 a.m. if you want lamb stew rather than whatever is already simmering. The menu is short: caldereta de cordero (ask for poco grasa if you prefer it lean), migas serranas flecked with chorizo, and queso manchego curado that has been aged in a cave whose temperature never rises above eight degrees. A three-course lunch with wine runs to €18; they do not take cards.

Back in Laguna, self-caterers make do with whatever they carried in. The village water is soft and tastes of snowmelt; it transforms packet soup into something almost alpine. In autumn locals gift surplus chestnuts, small and sweet, provided you help peel them. Accept – it is the nearest thing to a social whirl you will find.

Seasons that decide for you

May brings colour to the paramo: purple thyme, yellow cytinus, wild tulips the size of a thimble. Daytime temperatures reach 18 °C, nights still dip to 4 °C; pack both fleece and sun-hat. This is the easiest window for walking: snow has melted, tracks are firm, daylight lingers until nine.

August fiestas swell the population to perhaps 200. Former residents return from Valencia and Barcelona, pitch tents in almond orchards, and dance until the generator that powers the sound system runs out of diesel at three a.m. If you crave silence, avoid the middle weekend. If you want to see the village alive, book a rural house months ahead; every spare room is claimed by second cousins who still hold keys.

October is mushroom season. The forestry service lays on random checks; carry only a basket (plastic bags are illegal) and know your níscalos from your lethal cortinarius. Locals will glance at your haul and grunt approval or horror – there is no middle ground.

From December to March the village belongs to the cold. Thermometers sink to –12 °C, pipes freeze inside thick walls, and the CM-2106 is periodically closed by Guardia Civil snow-ploughs. If you arrive then, bring chains, a full tank, and a sense of scaled-down ambition. The reward is pure soundlessness: no agricultural machinery, no distant motorway, only the creak of expanding timber and the soft thud of snow slipping from a roof.

Leaving without goodbye

Checkout is simple: pull the door until the latch clicks, drop the key through the letterbox if you rented, and drive downhill until the pine scent fades. Within twenty minutes you reach the first almond terraces; within forty the temperature has risen ten degrees and the world regains its background hum. Laguna del Marquesado is already a ridge of grey silhouettes behind you, indistinguishable from the rock it is built on. The silence, though, travels a surprisingly long way.