Santa María del Val

The sound of 61 neighbours

At 1,200 metres the wind arrives before you do. It slips through Scots pines, rattles the bronze bell in the stone tower of Santa María la Mayor, then drops into the single square where every conversation in the village can be counted on two hands. Sixty-one residents, one café that opens when the owner feels like it, and a view that stretches south until the land folds into Cuenca’s limestone gorges. This is Santa María del Val, high in the Serranía Alta, a place whose greatest luxury is the absence of almost everything money normally buys.

Stone, timber and the altitude dividend

The houses climb a shallow ridge, their walls the same grey-brown granite that litters the surrounding hills. Roofs are tiled in dark Arab slate, the weight of centuries pressing eaves low enough to touch. Arched timber doors still carry the scars of axes, and iron knockers shaped like Moorish hands have worn smooth where generations have announced their arrival. Winter here can shave ten degrees off the temperature in Cuenca city, 70 km away, and snow sometimes shelves the narrow lanes deep enough to cancel even the weekly delivery van. Summer nights swing the other way: while Madrid swelters at 35 °C, the air at this height cools to 15 °C after dark, letting walkers sleep under wool blankets in July.

Inside the church, thick walls muffle the outside world to a whisper. The building went up in the sixteenth century on the proceeds of wool and pine resin; fresco fragments above the altar show ochre-faced saints whose paint has been thinned by incense and time. Mass is still announced by a single hand bell, rung at 11 a.m. on Sundays—tourists outnumber worshippers most weeks, but no one seems to mind as long as you close the door quietly.

Paths that remember more than the map

Head north-east past the last house and the tarmac gives way to a forest track once used by muleteers hauling resin barrels to the railway at Villalba de la Sierra. After ten minutes the pines close overhead, the temperature drops another notch, and the only soundtrack is your own breathing and the soft knock of cicadas warming in morning sun. Marked trails exist—look for white-and-yellow stripes on occasional trunks—but they assume you can read the landscape as well as the paint. A sensible strategy is to download the free IGN 1:25,000 sheet before leaving the UK; phone signal vanishes within a kilometre of the village.

For a half-day circuit, follow the track until it forks at a collapsed stone hut, then bear right along a cattle path that contours above the Arroyo del Val. The gradient is gentle but relentless, gaining 250 m over 4 km to a sandstone bluff locally called El Mirador de los Buitres. Griffon vultures nest here from February to June; bring binoculars and a sandwich, and you’ll probably have the ledge to yourself. Return by the same route, or continue south to link with the CM-2107, turning the walk into a 12 km loop that ends with a cold lager in the terrace bar of the Hotel Serranía in neighbouring Huélamo—assuming you timed it for a weekday when someone remembered to unlock the door.

What passes for lunch

There is no restaurant in Santa María del Val. The only shop, a room added to somebody’s ground floor, sells tinned tuna, UHT milk and ice creams that may or may not have melted and refrozen. Plan on self-catering, or phone ahead to Casa Rural La Solana (three doubles, €70 a night with kitchen) and ask them to stock the fridge. Local specialities—migas fried in mutton fat, game stews thick with paprika—must be sought in the valley towns: try Asador El Yuntero in Priego, 25 minutes down the mountain, where a plate of cordero al estilo Manchego will set you back €18 and feed two.

If you happen to visit the weekend closest to 15 August, the village re-populates for its fiesta. Emigrants return from Madrid and Barcelona, a sound system appears in the square, and the women who the rest of the year might be the only customer in the café take turns stirring a cauldron of caldereta that bubbles from dawn until well after midnight. Outsiders are welcome; bring your own plate and expect to be poured more wine than is strictly wise when the return path is uphill and cobbled.

Getting there, getting out

No bus, no train, no Uber. Fly to Madrid, collect a hire car at Barajas T4, and aim east on the A-3 for 90 minutes until the sign for Santa María del Val appears just after the turn-off for Huélamo. The final 12 km climb from the A-3 gains 600 m via switchbacks steep enough to make rental-clutch plates smell faintly of toast. Petrol stations are scarce once you leave the motorway—fill the tank at Tarancón even if the gauge still reads half. In winter carry snow chains; the road is ploughed sporadically and the white stuff can arrive overnight as late as April.

Accommodation inside the village is limited to two rural houses and a handful of rooms rented informally; if they’re full, the nearest beds are 20 km away in the spa town of Solán de Cabras. Book before you leave Britain—cancellation is free on most Spanish rural-letting sites, and it saves a 40-minute drive back down the mountain when you discover every door marked “completo”.

The honest verdict

Santa María del Val will not change your life. It offers no souvenir shops, no Michelin stars, no ancient ruins requiring a ticket. What it does provide is a calibrated sense of scale: a reminder that entire communities still organise themselves around church bells, weather forecasts and whether the pine cones opened early this year. If that sounds like deprivation, book elsewhere. If it sounds like a rare kind of freedom, pack walking boots, a thick jumper even in August, and enough cash for the café that might open tomorrow.