Graja de Campalbo

The church bell tolls eleven times, and only the wind answers back. From Graja de Campalbo's single street, the view stretches across pale gold cereal fields that roll like a calm sea towards the horizon. At 1,080 metres above sea level, this handful of stone houses feels less like a village and more like a weather station planted in Spain's high southern plateau.

Seventy kilometres south-east of Cuenca, the settlement belongs administratively to Campillos-Paravientos, though that connection exists mainly on paper. What matters here is altitude, distance, and the particular silence that comes when fewer than a hundred people share several square kilometres of rough pasture and dry-farmed land. The air carries a thin, resinous scent from scattered holm oaks and junipers, sharpened by altitude and the absence of traffic.

Stone, Lime and Winter Smoke

The building pattern repeats every few metres: ground floor for animals, external staircase, upper rooms for people. Walls are either bare limestone blocks tinted grey by centuries of sun, or whitewashed so recently that the glare hurts. Wooden doors, wide enough once for mules, stand ajar, revealing interior courtyards where chickens still scratch at beaten earth. One house has retained its stone feeding trough; another shows the faint outline of a bread oven bricked up during the 1960s. Nothing is staged, which means rusted agricultural implements lean against walls exactly where they were last used, and the only interpretation panel is the village itself.

Winter arrives early. The first frost can appear in late October, and when snow comes the CM-2106 access road becomes a gamble. Residents keep stores of olive branches and almond husks for heating; thin plumes of blue-grey smoke rise straight upwards on windless mornings, the only vertical feature in a landscape that otherwise refuses to rise much above a low swell. Summer compensates with extraordinary clarity: night skies darken enough for the Milky Way to throw a shadow, and midday temperatures regularly pass 35 °C, though the dryness makes it bearable if you carry water.

Walking the Stock Routes

Three footpaths leave the village, following drove roads older than any map. The widest, now a farm track, heads north towards the abandoned hamlet of Valdecasa. Stone way-markers appear every kilometre or so: waist-high pillars with a simple cross carved on the inland face, placed there in the nineteenth century to guide seasonal sheep movements between winter pasture in La Mancha and summer grazing in the Cuenca ranges. Walkers share the route with the few remaining shepherds, who cover the distance on battered ATVs rather than on foot, but still greet strangers with the formal "Buenas dias" owed to anyone mad enough to be out in midday heat.

The landscape changes subtly as you drop into shallow gullies. Wheat gives way to vetch and wild oats; crested larks burst from tussocks; a boot print fills with calcified rainwater and resembles a tiny chalk cliff. Distances deceive: a barn that looked ten minutes away still sits twenty minutes later across an imperceptible rise. Mobile reception vanishes with the same elasticity, so download offline maps before setting out.

Return routes loop east past threshing circles cut into flat limestone slabs. Some still hold their original stone rollers, abandoned the instant combine harvesters reached the province in the 1980s. Locals claim you can trace the year of withdrawal by the weeds growing through the axle holes: first annual grasses, then biennials, finally the knee-high broom that now dominates.

What You Won’t Find (and What You Will)

There is no bar, no shop, no filling station, and no cash machine. The nearest source of coffee open year-round lies twenty-two kilometres away in Uclés, home to a monumental monastery and tour groups who arrive by coach. Bring food, fill the tank in Cuenca, and expect to eat lunch on a stone wall while swallows dive overhead.

What you will find is an unfiltered lesson in how Spain’s interior survived the twentieth century. Maize is still milled in a shed powered by a tractor belt; elderly residents still bundle every twig for winter fuel; bread arrives twice weekly in a white van whose horn announces its arrival like a prop from a 1950s film. Ask politely and someone might demonstrate the hand-forged sickle used to harvest esparto grass, or explain why almond branches burn hotter than oak. These exchanges happen in the slow Spanish of Castilla-La Mancha, but gestures cover the gaps, and nobody rushes to finish.

Timing the Visit

April provides the kindest introduction. Overnight frosts have finished, the first wild gladioli speckle roadside banks, and wheat shoots are short enough to reveal stonecurleys crouching between rows. Thermometers climb to 18 °C by midday but mornings demand a fleece. May intensifies colour: the cereal turns luminous green, then silvery blonde under June sun. From July until mid-September only the seriously heat-tolerant should attempt long walks; instead, come for astronomical darkness during new-moon weekends, when star-counts exceed two thousand on clear nights.

Autumn brings migrant cranes heading south to Extremadura. Their bugle calls drift down at dawn, echoing off limestone so cleanly that you can pinpoint individual birds in the skein. October light flattens the horizon, making it impossible to judge where land ends and sky begins; photographers call it "the white balance month" because every hue desaturates into soft amber.

Winter is not off-limits, merely conditional. Snow can isolate the village for twenty-four hours, but residents keep a small tractor with a front blade for cutting through drifts. If you arrive during a fall, expect to be dragooned into helping clear the plaza before coffee – instant integration, Spanish style. Night temperatures dip to –8 °C, yet daytimes usually recover above freezing, perfect for short sharp walks under crystalline air.

Eating, Sort Of

Self-catering is the default. Cuenca's Saturday market stocks Manchego cheese aged in caves, rough bread that lasts a week, and jars of thick tomato sauce fortified with garden herbs. Add a wedge of local morcilla spiced with cumin, plus early-season olives, and you can assemble country lunches that taste of iron, smoke and thyme.

If you crave a tablecloth, drive to Campillos-Paravientos (11 kilometres) for weekday menús del día at €12 including wine. Expect judías blancas stewed with hare when hunters have done well, or carpaccio of segureño lamb when they haven't. Portions are sized for people who spent the morning swinging a mattock, not tapping a keyboard, so consider sharing.

Leaving Again

The return journey always feels shorter, a geographic sleight of hand common to lonely places. Perhaps it's because the mind has already processed the vastness, or because the road surface improves once you re-join the CM-2106. Either way, the last sight of Graja de Campalbo shrinks to a single terracotta roof among pale fields, indistinguishable from a boulder until the sun catches the metal cross atop the church tower. Then that too disappears, and you are back on the central plateau with its grain silos and half-built industrial estates, wondering whether the silence you just experienced was real or merely the contrast with what passes elsewhere for progress.