Campillo de Ranas

The houses wear the mountain. In Campillo de Ranas every wall, every roof, every chimney breast is sliced from the same dark slate that breaks through the soil outside the village. Stand at the upper edge at dawn and the place looks half-built, half-quarried: terraces of black stone dissolving into the ridgeline until you’re no longer sure where architecture ends and geology begins.

That ambiguity starts the moment you leave the A-1 motorway at Somosierra and climb 35 kilometres of switchbacks. The road gains 800 metres in its final 20 minutes; ears pop, pine gives way to oak, and the temperature drops six degrees before you’ve found somewhere to park. At 1,120 m above sea level Campillo is higher than any ski village in Scotland, and winter reminds you of it. Between December and March the thermometer can lunge below –10 °C, and when snow drifts across the GU-127 the only way in is on foot from the neighbouring hamlet of Majaelrayo. Summer compensates with warm days and knife-sharp nights—ideal walking weather, though you’ll still want a fleece after nine o’clock.

Most visitors arrive for the slate, a building material so abundant that even the village church carries it in its bell tower. The style is known locally as Arquitectura Negra, shared with half a dozen settlements along the Sierra Norte de Guadalajara. Houses are squat, two-storey, built directly onto bedrock; roofs are pitched steeply and tiled with wafer-thin sheets of stone that ring like crockery when hail hits. Timber balconies, painted ox-blood red or left to weather, add the only flash of colour. The effect is more Snowdonia farmhouse than Castilian pueblo, which may explain why British walkers feel instantly at home.

You can cover the grid of lanes in twenty minutes, but it’s worth lingering. Morning light turns the slate metallic; by late afternoon the walls drink in the sun and glow like cooling iron. Photographers settle on the corner of Calle Real and the tiny plaza where the 16th-century church of San Juan Bautista stands; the bell tower gives a diagonal line to counter the jagged roofscape. Sit long enough and someone will lean out of a doorway and ask whether you’ve come for the mushrooms. October is boletus season, and the village fills with weekend foragers whose baskets carry the faint earthy smell that chefs in Madrid pay €40 a kilo to put on their menus.

If you want to join them, take the signed path that drops from the top of Calle de la Cruz into the Barranco del Río. It’s a two-hour loop through rebollo oak and granite boulders polished by last winter’s spate. The water runs cold enough to numb a hand in June; deeper pools tempt swimmers, though the temperature rarely creeps past 14 °C even in July. Add another hour and you can continue along the GR-60 long-distance trail to the abandoned hamlet of Aldeanueva, where a roofless chapel opens straight onto cow pasture.

Serious hikers head east onto the Cabeza de Ranas ridgeline, a five-hour circuit that tops out at 1,550 m and gives views north to the Meseta and south to the skyscrapers of Guadalajara—proof, if you needed it, that Madrid is only ninety minutes away by car. The path is way-marked but carries little traffic; phone signal is patchy, so download the track before you set off. A Spanish military map at 1:25,000 is still the most reliable backup.

Back in the village the choice of beds is small and honest. Three casas rurales share maybe a dozen rooms between them; expect stone floors, wood-burning stoves and radiators that clank like the Central Line at rush hour. Prices hover around €70 a night for two, including breakfast of churros thick enough to double as scaffolding. The nearest hotel is 18 kilometres away in Majaelrayo, so if you want a drink with dinner walk to the bar at La Fragua while the sky is still light; after 10 pm the streets are lit only by the spill from kitchen windows.

Eating is seasonal and hearty. Venison chorizo arrives in thin, paprika-red disks that taste faintly of juniper; wild-boar stew is dark, slow-cooked, closer to Welsh cawl than anything Iberian. House wine is from Valdepeñas, priced like water and just as welcome after a day on the ridge. The one restaurant that takes cards, El Roble, opens only at weekends and fills with madrileños escaping the A-2 traffic; book before you leave Britain if August is your only window. Otherwise bring cash—there is no ATM and the tiny general store keeps Spanish hours, meaning it may shut on Tuesday for no reason anyone can remember.

Fiesta time compresses the year into three short bursts. San Juan Bautista on 24 June drags exiles back from the cities; the plaza hosts a mass followed by a communal paella cooked in a pan the size of a satellite dish. Mid-August brings open-air cinema and a five-a-side football tournament on a pitch so steep that corner kicks run downhill. Winter is quieter: Christmas Eve mass ends with villagers carrying lanterns to the cemetery gates, a tradition imported from the mining towns of León and kept alive here because no one thought to stop.

Leaving is harder than arriving. The road down to the motorway corkscrews through cork oak and lavender, and for the first ten minutes the only other lights belong to the slate roofs you have just left, glinting like wet iron in the rear-view mirror. Lower down, the Meseta opens out, temperatures rise, and the mountain feels suddenly improbable—an outcrop of North Wales dropped onto the Spanish plain, complete with its own weather, its own stone, its own slow clock.