Bienservida

The church bell strikes eleven and the only other sound is a farmer scraping his gate. Bienservida, 893 m up in the Sierra de Alcaraz, doesn’t do rush. Half the houses are still shuttered; the bakery has sold out of crusty pan de pueblo but the owner won’t reopen until she finishes her coffee. This is the Spain that package brochures promise and rarely deliver – but it comes with footnotes you need to read before you arrive.

High-plateau life, minus the gloss

Whitewash flakes off in hand-sized chips, revealing stone the colour of winter wheat. Streets climb so sharply that cars park sideways, two wheels on the pavement, and elderly residents treat the gradient as a free gym. At the top sits the fifteenth-century church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, its tower patched with brick where lightning once took offence. Inside, the air smells of candle wax and cold stone; a single volunteer will unlock the door if you ask in the bakery, but she’ll want to chat about the weather first.

Altitude matters here. Mornings can be ten degrees cooler than Albacete on the plain below, and when the wind swings north-west it carries the metallic scent of pine resin from the surrounding laricio forest. Snow is uncommon but not freakish; if you visit between December and February bring a proper coat, not a fashion jacket. Summer, on the other hand, is dry and fierce – the sort of heat that splits terracotta roof tiles and sends lizards scuttling for shade at nine in the morning.

Walking tracks and empty roads

Three way-marked footpaths leave from the village square. The shortest loops through holm-oak pasture and takes forty minutes; the longest climbs 400 m to an abandoned shepherd’s hut with views across the corridor of the Guadalimar valley. None are difficult, but the limestone can be slick after rain and the signage assumes you already know which ridge is which. Early risers sometimes see wild boar on the lower slopes; golden eagles ride the thermals above the cliffs at midday.

Road cyclists rate the CM-412 south towards Munera: twenty-five kilometres of switchbacks and almost no traffic. The gradient averages six per cent, enough to make your thighs query your life choices, but the descent gives back every metre with interest. Mountain bikers prefer the forest tracks north to El Robledo – hard-pack and pine needles, occasional loose shale, no refreshments until the next village. Pack more water than you think you’ll need; the only fountain on the route dried up in the 2017 drought and hasn’t fully recovered.

What turns up on the table

Lunch starts at two, or when the proprietor feels like it. Bar Central keeps a hand-written menu that changes according to what the owner’s cousin shoots or picks. Gazpacho manchego arrives as a dense game stew, rabbit or sometimes partridge, topped with squares of flatbread that hold their shape just long enough. A half-portion feeds two; locals mop the bowl with rough country bread and regard cutlery as optional. Vegetarians get pisto manchego – a slow-cooked tangle of aubergine, pepper and tomato that tastes of olive smoke and summer – plus a fried egg if you ask nicely.

The cheese deserves its own sentence. Manchego curado from a flock that grazes the high dehesa north of town is sold in waxed wedges at the counter. It’s sharper than supermarket versions, with a tang that sits somewhere between Lancashire and Parmesan, and it travels well wrapped in a tea-towel for the drive home. Buy it on Friday morning; the supplier doesn’t deliver again until Tuesday and the village shop shuts at 1 pm on Saturday, reopening Monday if the owner’s granddaughter isn’t off school.

When the village remembers how to party

Mid-August brings the fiestas of Santa Quiteria. The population swells to maybe a thousand as emigrants return from Valencia and Barcelona. Brass bands march through streets too narrow for a Mini, fireworks ricochet off stone walls, and the evening bull-run is more village heifer than Pamplona danger. Visitors are welcome but there are no grandstands or ticketed seats – you lean against a neighbour’s doorway and accept a plastic cup of warm beer when it’s offered. Accommodation within the village becomes non-existent; book a rural house in neighbouring Alcaraz or Talarrubias and accept that you’ll drive home on lanes with more rabbits than streetlights.

September’s romería to the Virgen de Cortes chapel is quieter, and in some ways more revealing. Families pack paella pans and gas bottles into ancient Land Rovers, drive up a dirt track and spend the day in the pine shade. If you wander up on foot you’ll be invited to share lunch; bring your own contribution – a bag of crisps, a bottle of tinto – and practise your Spanish names for clouds. The return procession starts at dusk, Virgen shouldered by six men who learned the job from their fathers, everyone singing the same hymn their grandparents knew by heart.

The practical small print

Bienservida has no hotel, no campsite and only three self-catering cottages. Two are on the main street; the third is an old schoolhouse half a kilometre out, reached by a lane so steep that hire-car clutches smell after the first ascent. Expect to pay €70–€90 a night for two bedrooms, wood-burning stove and a roof terrace that looks across tiled roofs to the sierra. Bring slippers – stone floors are beautiful and glacial.

The nearest cash machine is a ten-minute drive away in Villaverde de Guadalimar; the village shop takes cards but the system crashes whenever the wind blows down the phone line. Fill the tank before you arrive – the local garage closes at eight and after that it’s a thirty-kilometre dash to an all-night station on the A-31. Sunday lunchtime options are Bar Central or a packet of crisps; choose wisely.

So, should you bother?

If your idea of Spain involves cocktails at midnight, give Bienservida a miss. If you want to remember what quiet sounds like – real quiet, broken only by goat bells and the click of cycling cleats – set the sat-nav and come mid-week in May or October. The village won’t entertain you; it will leave you alone, which is increasingly the rarest gift a destination can offer. Bring good shoes, a Spanish phrase-book and an expectation that nothing will happen on time. That’s precisely the point.