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about La Cierva
Mountain village with major paleontological sites; red-earth and pine landscape
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The church bell strikes noon, and the sound carries clear across the valley. In La Cierva, population thirty-seven, this counts as rush hour. The village hangs onto a mountainside in Cuenca's Serranía Media, its stone houses clamped between pine forests that have clawed their own foothold at 1,150 metres. At this altitude, the air thins and the modern world thins with it.
The Arithmetic of Emptiness
Eighty kilometres from Cuenca city, the road climbs through switchbacks where stone pines replace olive groves. Mobile signal falters around the 900-metre mark; by the time you reach La Cierva, Google Maps has given up entirely. The village consists of three streets, two functioning fountains, and a bakery that closed in 1998. What remains is a textbook example of Castilian mountain architecture: grey stone walls half a metre thick, Arabic tiles weathered to terracotta shards, wooden doors sagging on hand-forged hinges.
Winter arrives early. The first frost usually lands mid-October; snow can cut the village off for days. Residents keep three months of firewood stacked against their northern walls, a habit learned from grandparents who watched the Civil War pass beneath these same eaves. Summer brings relief but also the only crowds: returning emigrants who swell numbers to perhaps ninety during August fiestas, parking 4x4s where goats normally roam.
Walking Without Waymarks
La Cierva offers no tourist office, no gift shop, no interpretive panels. Instead, it provides an antidote to the Camino's conveyor belt of credential stamps and albergue gossip. The GR-160 long-distance footpath skirts the village boundary, though you'd need Ordnance Survey-level vigilance to spot the faded red-and-white flashes on crumbling boundary stones. More reliable are the old livestock trails—cañadas—that radiate outward like spokes. These paths, wide enough for two mules, connect to neighbouring hamlets such as Villar de Olalla (12 kilometres west) and Huélamo (9 kilometres east) through passes that still show medieval cart ruts.
Autumn walkers should pack baskets: the surrounding pinewards deliver saffron milk caps and níscalos when October rains coincide with cool nights. Local knowledge matters; the 2022 mycology season saw Guardia Civil officers confiscating 30 kilograms from over-zealous Madrid weekenders who'd ignored the two-kilometre exclusion rule around village limits. Bring small change too—La Cierva's lone honorary guardia issues on-the-spot fines starting at €60.
A Kitchen Without a Menu
There are no restaurants. None. The nearest bar stands six kilometres downhill in Fuentelespino de Moya, where retired miner José serves caldico—a broth of hen and mountain herbs—between 1 pm and 3 pm, provided his hip isn't playing up. Instead, food happens behind closed doors. Knock politely at number 14 (the house with blue shutters) and Concha might sell you a portion of morteruelo, the area's pâté-like game stew, spooned into an old yoghurt pot. €5; cash only.
The village's culinary calendar follows the hunt. Wild boar season opens mid-October; by December, every doorway sports a crimson carcass dripping into enamel bowls. January belongs to the pig slaughter: neighbours gather at 5 am to scald, scrape and portion an animal that's fed on acorns from the surrounding dehesa. Visitors who flinch at blood should avoid the square that week; those who don't might leave with a vacuum-packed presa shoulder, €12 per kilo, shrink-wrapped by someone's nephew who works at the Mercadona in Cuenca.
When the Lights Go Out
Electricity arrived 1967; mains drainage is still fiction. What this means for overnight guests is simple: book elsewhere. The nearest accommodation lies 25 minutes' drive away in Moya, where Casa Rural La Tejería charges €70 for a double room with underfloor heating and views across the Júcar gorge. Closer options exist—an English couple runs yurts near Villalba de la Sierra—but the track turns impassable after heavy rain, and sat-nav sends rental cars into ravines.
Day-trippers should time carefully. In winter, the sun drops behind Peñalba at 4 pm; temperatures plummet eight degrees within an hour. Summer brings the opposite problem: no shade exists between the church and the cemetery, a five-minute walk that feels longer when thermometers hit 36 °C. Carry water—there's no shop, and the public fountain by the frontón court runs dry during August droughts.
The Festival That Isn't for You
Fiestas patronales happen 15 August, but arrive with modest expectations. The procession involves twelve people, one brass band borrowed from neighbouring village, and a statue of the Virgin that's carried exactly 200 metres before everyone retreats indoors for cocido. Outsiders are tolerated rather than welcomed; photography requires permission, especially of the elderly men who play mus (a Basque card game) beneath the walnut tree using 1950s Spanish-suited decks.
More atmospheric is the San Antón blessing on 17 January. Locals lead tethered mules and cage-fed rabbits to the church doorway where the priest sprinkles holy water. The ritual lasts seven minutes; the animals look bored. Yet standing there amid woodsmoke and animal breath, watching a tradition that predates tapas and package tours, delivers something no Parador weekend can match: the Spain that guidebooks claim disappeared with Franco's death.
Leaving Without Looking Back
The last phone box in the province stands outside the cemetery gates. It hasn't worked since 2009, but someone still coils the receiver neatly each morning. This is La Cierva's gift: the revelation that places exist where maintenance becomes optional, where community survives without apps, where mountain silence amplifies rather than isolates.
Drive away at dusk and the village shrinks in rear-view mirrors until only the church tower remains, a stone finger against a lavender sky. Lower down, civilisation returns in stages: first the phone signal, then the petrol station, finally the dual carriageway where British-registered motorhomes hog the middle lane. None of it feels quite real after a day among people who measure time by firewood stacks and church bells. That's the point.
