Salinas del Manzano

At 1,100 Metres, Traffic Means Vultures

The road from Cuenca climbs past the last industrial estate and begins its proper work: forty switchbacks through sandstone cliffs and pine plantations until the dashboard altimeter touches 1,100 m. Suddenly the radio crackles dead, phone bars vanish, and Salinas del Manzano appears—a tight cluster of ochre roofs wedged between two barrancos. Population sixty-seven on paper, rather fewer on a weekday when the fields call. The village makes no grab for attention; it simply waits, the way a mountain does.

Stone walls here are thick enough to swallow sound. Close the car door softly and you’ll hear what the locals mean by “silencio”: not absence, but a low fabric of wind, distant goat bells, and, if you time it right, the slow flap of griffon vultures heading home to roost on the limestone rim. They commute along the same thermals the salt muleteers used four centuries ago, when the place still earned its keep from evaporation pans and gave the surname Salinas to half the province.

A Blueprint for Winter Survival

Houses are squared off and serious. Granite footings, chestnut beams, roof tiles the colour of burnt toast—everything pitched to shrug off snow that can arrive overnight and stay for weeks. Balconies are narrow afterthoughts; the real life happens behind, in kitchens that smell of cured pork and dried oregano. Peer through an open doorway and you may catch a flash of a 1950s calendar still thumbtacked to the wall, the paper browned like tobacco leaf. Nobody here wastes heat on display.

The plaza mayor is barely the size of a tennis court. A single bar opens for coffee at seven, shutters again by nine, and reappears on Fridays for churros. The parish church keeps watch from the uphill side, its tower a hand-width wider than the nave, as if the builder mis-read the plans and decided pride was cheaper than stone. Step inside: the temperature drops another five degrees, incense mingles with mouse droppings, and the only illumination is a greenish bulb that makes every fresco look seasick. It is, deliberately, nothing like the restored show-pieces of the meseta. Salinas saves its Euros for firewood.

Footpaths That Remember Migrants

Three marked walks leave the upper edge of the village. The shortest, a 45-minute loop to the ruined corrals of Los Erasos, is enough to understand the geography: cereal strips on the south-facing slopes, pine and juniper claiming the shade, and everywhere the dry stone walls that once divided communal holdings before the young left for Madrid factories. Waymarking is discreet—two red stripes on a fence post, a cairn where the trail splits—so download the GPS track while you still have 4G down in the valley.

Keener legs can follow the GR-66 variant west to Huélamo (11 km, three hours), dropping into the Derrumblar gorge where bee-eaters nest in May and where, after heavy rain, the path turns into a calf-deep sluice. Take water; there is none en route, and the bar in Huélamo keeps no set timetable. In summer the stretch can be done at dawn, returning by noon before the thermals start lifting the vultures. Winter transforms the same track into a miniature cross-country ski run if snow has settled; locals fit studded tyres and drive it for laughs, headlights carving tunnels through white walls.

What You Eat Depends on the Day

There is no restaurant, no Sunday craft market, no olive-oil tasting cave. Instead, hospitality is measured in invitations. Mention to the man refilling your windscreen washer at the fuente that you’re heading up to look for boletus and you may find yourself handed a paper envelope of dried níscalos “in case you come back empty.” The village’s one entrepreneurial soul, Marisol, runs a micro-tienda from her garage: tinned tomatoes, UHT milk, and, on Fridays, a tray of chuletas that disappear by ten. Price list is taped to the freezer: lamb chops €14/kg, honesty box fashioned from an old cigar tin.

If you want a proper menu del día, drive twenty minutes down to Tragacete where Casa Santiago serves garlic soup thick enough to hold a spoon vertical, followed by conejo a la cazadora. Salinas itself supplies the mushrooms, the rosemary, and occasionally the hunter. Payment is cash only; the nearest ATM is another mountain range away in Cuenca, so fill your wallet before the ascent.

When the Snow Gate Closes, You Stay

The CM-2106 is kept open with grit and optimism, but after 30 cm of fresh powder the ploughs admit defeat. A red-and-white barrier swings across the road just above the bridge; from that moment the village belongs to itself. Power cuts average three a winter—generators kick in at the school-cum-community centre where blankets, coffee, and a single Wi-Fi hotspot appear as if by magic. Visitors caught on the wrong side of the barrier are offered floor space and a lesson in Spanish dominoes. The rule is simple: you contribute firewood or you lose. Nobody starves; the pantries are still stocked on August’s pig slaughter, and the communal oven behind the church fires up for mass bread baking every other day.

Spring release comes suddenly. One March morning the barrier lifts, meltwater roars down the ramblas, and the first camper van of the year edges through, Bavarian plates, bicycles on the back, occupants blinking like hibernated bears. The village watches without comment; last year’s snow tourists left €3.20 in the honesty box and took three kilos of wild asparagus. Memory here is longer than the winter.

Leaving Without the Instagram Shot

There is no mirador platform, no heart-shaped photo frame, no souvenir shop selling fridge magnets shaped like salt shakers. The best momento is likely to be the sound you carry away: midday bells echoing off granite, followed by a pause so complete you can hear your own pulse. Turn the car around at the cemetery—stone crosses leaning like tired soldiers—and start the descent. Within ten minutes phone signal returns, Spotify autoplays, and the mountain closes its wooden door behind you. That is the photograph Salinas allows, and it develops only in retrospect.