Bañuelos

The road to Banuelos climbs past the last wheat fields and keeps climbing. By the time the asphalt narrows to a single lane, the village appears: stone houses welded to a mountainside, their terracotta roofs the only warm colour in a landscape of grey limestone and pine. At 1,154 metres, this is one of Spain’s highest settlements, and it feels it. The air thins, phone signals fade, and the only sound is wind moving through wild rosemary.

Thirteen people still call the place home. Their houses—built from the mountain itself—form a tight knot of walls and passages that seem to grow out of the rock rather than sit on it. Limestone blocks, hand-split chestnut beams and Arab tiles have withstood a century of blizzards, yet the architecture is understated, almost shy. Nothing here was designed to impress outsiders; everything was built to survive winter.

Why the Sierra Forgets You

Banuelos sits in the Sierra del Ducado, a saw-tooth ridge that divides the provinces of Guadalajara and Cuenca. The nearest petrol pump is 35 minutes away in Zaorejas; the nearest supermarket closer to an hour. When snow arrives—usually between December and March—the access road is cleared only after the main highways are sorted, which can mean two or three days of voluntary isolation. Locals keep freezers stocked and firewood stacked against the barn wall: a habit British hill-farmers would recognise.

That altitude also gives the village a climate closer to the Peak District than to central Spain. July nights drop to 12 °C, perfect for sleep but brutal if you packed only shorts. In August the fiestas patronales still draw former residents back from Madrid and Valencia; for one weekend the population swells to perhaps eighty. A mass is sung in the single-nave church, followed by cocido served from aluminium cauldrons and an evening dance held on a terrace hacked from the rock. By Monday the music stops, the children leave, and the sierra reclaims its silence.

Walking Without Waymarks

Official hiking leaflets don’t exist here, yet the paths are easy to read if you know what to look for: stone water troughs at forks, twin ruts carved by centuries of hooves, the occasional steel ring where mules were once tethered. A steady 45-minute climb westwards brings you to the Cuchillos ridge, where the view opens across a chessboard of pine and oak all the way to the Tagus gorge. Griffon vultures cruise at eye level; in October migrant red kites use the same thermals.

No permits, no entry fees, no crowds—just remember that weather changes fast above a thousand metres. A breezy May morning can flip to sleet by early afternoon, and the only shelter is an abandoned shepherd’s hut whose roof collapsed in 1978. Carry a proper waterproof, even if the sky over Madrid is cloudless.

Autumn brings a different harvest. Locals head into the forest with wicker baskets and the kind of curved knives Basque chefs pay fortunes for. Boletus edulis, parasol mushrooms and, if the frost has been kind, a scattering of trumpets de la mort appear beneath the oaks. Outsiders are welcome to forage, but the unwritten rule is that you ask first at the single occupied house still selling eggs from a fridge on the porch. Advice is given freely; misidentification here can ruin more than dinner.

Where to Sleep, What to Eat

There is no hotel, no guesthouse, no booking dot com. The ayuntamiento owns two stone cottages that can be rented by calling the municipal office in Zaorejas (open Tuesday and Thursday mornings only). Each sleeps four, has a wood-burning stove and charges €40 per night, payable in cash to the caretaker who arrives on a quad bike with the key. Bring sheets; towels are provided, but they’ve seen better decades.

Food means self-catering. The small shop in Zaorejas stocks tinned sardines, local chorizo and vacuum-packed pulses grown in La Mancha. If you pass through Sigüenza on the drive up, fill a cool-box at the Saturday market: aged manchego, wild asparagus, perhaps a bottle of cencibel from a cooperative that still uses the 1950s basket press. Banuelos itself has one bar, open on request. Knock twice; if the lights come on, beer is €1.50 and the tapas is whatever Antonio cooked for himself that day—usually migas with grapes, sometimes a potato and cod stew that tastes better than it sounds.

The Honest Season

Spring arrives late. By mid-April the cherry trees below the village suddenly bloom, a week behind the blossoms in the valley. Between May and early June the meadows are loud with skylarks and the air smells of thyme and damp pine. Daytime temperatures sit in the high teens, cool enough for walking, warm enough to sit outside with a coffee at noon. This is the sweet spot: roads are clear, skies are stable and the only other walkers are shepherds moving stock to higher pasture.

High summer is surprisingly tolerable. At 30 °C the village feels hot, but it’s still five degrees cooler than Madrid and the humidity is low. Flies replace mosquitoes; midges haven’t discovered the altitude yet. The downside is water: the natural spring that once fed stone troughs slows to a trickle, so every drop for the cottages is trucked up the hill. Showers are metered by the caretaker; if you exceed the agreed 50 litres you’ll pay an extra euro and get a lecture on climate change delivered in rapid Castilian.

Winter is not for casual weekends. Snow can fall from November onwards; January averages six days when the thermometer never rises above zero. The cottages stay warm—thick stone walls see to that—but the access road becomes a luge track. Unless you carry chains and have experience driving on compacted snow, plan to park at the Mirador del Marquesado, four kilometres below, and walk the final climb. On the plus side, the light is extraordinary: crisp, shadowless, turning the surrounding forest black and the limestone outcrops a sharp, almost surgical white.

Leaving Without a Souvenir

There is no craft shop, no fridge magnet, no artisanal honey labelled with a cartoon bee. The only thing you can take away is the quiet, and even that evaporates once you drop below six hundred metres and the first lorry rattles past on the CM-2015. Yet the village sticks in the mind longer than many places that charge for parking. Perhaps it’s the realisation that an entire way of life—stone roofs, communal ovens, sharing soup with strangers—has not yet been reduced to weekend heritage. Or perhaps it’s simpler: standing on a ridge with only vultures for company, looking down on a cluster of houses that refuse to surrender to gravity or demographics, and understanding that some maps still have edges.