Peñascosa

The evening bus from Albacete wheezes to a halt 1,169 m above sea level. One passenger steps off, the driver flicks on the hazard lights long enough to unload a cardboard box of groceries, then the engine roars back to life and the road is silent again. From the tiny square, the only illumination comes from a single street-lamp and the moon reflecting off pale limestone walls. Welcome to Penascosa, where the night sky is still brighter than anything the council could install.

Why altitude matters

Three hundred and twenty-nine residents live high enough for the air to feel thin in winter and for midsummer temperatures to stay five degrees cooler than the baking plain below. That difference shapes every detail: roofs are steep so snow slides off, walls are half a metre thick, and the village bakery fires its wood oven at dawn so the heat has dissipated before the day warms up. When the clouds sit in the valley, Penascosa becomes an island of terracotta roofs poking through a white sea; when the wind swings north, you can taste pine resin on every breath.

The Sierra de Alcaraz stretches south-east of the capital like a forgotten spine. Most travellers blaze along the A-31 to Alicante never realising that, twenty minutes north of the motorway, the wheat fields tilt upwards and turn to forest. Penascosa sits at the junction of two shepherd paths that have linked summer and winter pastures since at least the thirteenth century; the modern road still follows one of them, hair-pinning up through holm oaks until the rocks close in and the village suddenly appears.

Stone that talks

No souvenir shops, no audio guides, no entrance fee. The heritage here is simply the place itself, and it rewards walkers who read walls the way others read guidebooks. Start at the church, a modest rectangle finished in 1789 with a bell tower that used to double as a fire-watch point. The sandstone blocks around the south door still carry masons’ marks—tiny crosses and arrows that served as medieval invoices—while the step is worn into a smooth hollow by centuries of kneeling farmers checking the weather before Mass.

From the porch, three lanes fan out like spokes. Calle de los Moros follows the contour, its houses built back-to-back so each shares a neighbour’s warmth. Look for the olive-wood balconies: the timber expands in the cold and contracts in the heat, a primitive thermostat that creaks louder than any central heating. Further up, Callejón del Barranco squeezes between two gullies; after heavy rain a stream appears from nowhere, races under a tiny bridge and vanishes into a thicket of rosemary. Children use the spot as a thermometer: if water is flowing, school is probably cancelled because the access road will be icy.

The fourth side of the square is open, giving a straight sight-line to the limestone ridge that gave the village its name—peña rocosa, rocky crag. From here a mule track climbs 250 m in twenty minutes to the Ermita de la Virgen de las Nieves, a chapel locked except on 5 August when villagers carry the statue down for the patronal fiesta. The gradient is brutal, but the payoff is a balcony over two provinces: Albacete’s steel-grey plateaus to the north-west, Jaén’s blue sierras to the south. On ultra-clear days the outline of the Sierra Nevada appears, snow glinting like broken glass.

Walking without waymarks

Penascosa is a staging post on the GR-130, a long-distance loop that circles the Sierra de Alcaraz in four days, but you needn’t commit to boots and backpacks to get under the skin of the place. A ninety-minute circuit leaves the top of the village, skirts a pine plantation, then drops into the Cañada Real—an ancient drove-road wide enough for fifty head of cattle. The stones are polished smooth by hooves; in spring the verges are thick with wild peonies and the air rings with cuckoos. Turn left at the charcoal-making platform—a blackened circle the size of a tennis court—and you’re back in time for coffee.

Serious hikers can keep going east along the Cañada to the head of the Bogarra valley, an eight-kilometre stride that gains another 400 m and ends at a waterfall that freezes in January. The route is way-marked by splashes of yellow paint that fade faster than the regional government can repaint them, so download the track before leaving; phone reception is patchy once you drop off the ridge.

What you’ll eat—and when you won’t

Penascosa has one bar, one shop and no restaurant. The bar opens at seven for coffee and churros, closes at three, reopens at eight for beer and tapas, then shuts when the last customer leaves—sometimes ten, sometimes midnight. Saturday is lottery morning, Sunday is card afternoon; try to order toast while the elders are shouting ¡bingo! and you’ll be ignored. The shop stocks UHT milk, tinned tuna, and local cheese wrapped in newspaper. If you need fresh meat, the butcher’s van arrives Tuesday and Friday at eleven; the queue forms early and housewives still debate the precise marbling on a pork chop as if the Inquisition were listening.

Plan accordingly. Self-caterers should stock up in Albacete; the municipal market there sells gazpacho manchego packets—a dry-flat bread stew rehydrated with game stock, perfect after a windy hike. Vegetarians face slim pickings: even the migas (fried breadcrumbs) arrive studded with chorizo. On fiesta days the village lays on a communal paella in the square; visitors are welcome but you’ll be expected to donate five euros towards the wine fund and wash your own plate.

Seasons of silence

Come in late April and the night temperature can dip to 3 °C; midday hits 18 °C under a sky so clean it feels rinsed. Wild thyme covers the hills, bees work overtime, and the only traffic jam is a shepherd moving two hundred sheep through the main street. May brings thunderstorms that echo like artillery between the cliffs; roads wash out, power fails, and locals treat candle-lit dominoes as a sport.

July and August are reliable, dry and 28 °C at noon, but the village doubles in size as returning grandchildren inflate bouncy castles in the square. Accommodation books up months ahead; if you must visit then, bring ear-plugs because the fiesta sound system is vintage 1987 and likes to reminisce about Madonna until four in the morning.

October is the photographers’ month: the resin in the pines scents the air, sunlight slants amber, and the first frost silences the cicadas. By December the place feels suspended. Snow can cut the road for days; the bakery is the only business that never closes. If you’re lucky enough to be stranded, the mayor keeps a list of spare rooms—no star rating, but always heated by wood stoves that smell of cinnamon and pine.

Beds, buses and blisters

Seventeen rooms exist in the entire municipality, split between three family houses registered as casas rurales. Expect stone floors, wool blankets, and bathrooms added as afterthoughts in 2003. Prices hover around €55 a night for two, including a breakfast tray of toast, olive oil and thick hot chocolate that the owner’s mother insists you finish. Reserve by phone; emails are checked on Thursdays when the library Wi-Fi is working.

Public transport is the daily ALSA coach that leaves Albacete at 15:15 and returns at 07:00 next morning—fine for a weekend, awkward for a week. Driving is straightforward: take the A-31 to Balazote, then the CM-3203 for 38 km of climbing bends. Petrol stations are scarce; fill up at the Repsol on the roundabout before you leave the motorway. In winter carry chains; the final 3 km can ice over even when the rest of the road is clear.

Leave the lights off

Electricity reached Penascosa in 1963, but the village still switches off. Street-lamps dim at midnight; on new-moon nights the Milky Way unfurls like a highway across the sky. Stand in the square, let your eyes adjust, and you’ll understand why the council fought to become part of Spain’s Red de Pueblos Estrella—a network that legislates against light pollution. Shooting stars are common, satellites inevitable; the only soundtrack is the occasional clank of a cowbell echoing up from some invisible fold in the hills.

Stay long enough and you stop reaching for superlatives. Penascosa is not a secret, nor a revelation; it is simply a place that refused to become anything other than itself. Bring walking shoes, an appetite for pork, and the patience to sit through a thunderstorm without checking your phone. The village will supply the altitude, the silence, and a sky the colour of spilled ink.