Hiendelaencina

The Road That Ends in Quiet

The A-2 from Madrid unravels across the meseta like grey ribbon, then suddenly tilts upward at kilometre 118. Turn south onto the CM-1001 and the tarmac narrows, climbing 600 metres in twelve kilometres of switchbacks. Phone bars vanish. Lorries disappear. By the time the stone houses appear at 1,060 metres, the only sound is wind and the click-click of cooling brakes. Welcome to Hiendelaencina, population 115, altitude higher than Ben Nevis, nightlife nil.

The village squats on a shoulder of the Serranía de Guadalajara, a bruised limestone range that separates Madrid’s commuter belt from the empty Spain journalists like to call “forgotten”. Here the forgetting feels literal: whole streets stand roofless, their timber balconies dangling like broken ribs. Yet the houses that remain are immaculate—slate tiles brushed weekly, granite thresholds painted the traditional blood-red against witches. Someone still cares.

Stone, Snow and Silver

Hiendelaencina’s name is a mouthful even for Spaniards; locals shorten it to “La Encina” and leave it at that. The prefix “Hiendela-” probably references old iron workings, though the money came later when Roman engineers chased a vein of silver-lead ore through the hill behind the church. You can still pick out the scar: a pale gash above the treeline locals call El Tajo, now fenced off by the regional park because the adits drop straight into black water. A ten-minute footpath from the churchyard leads to a platform with no safety rail; peer over and the rock face glitters with galena shards. It is beautiful, lethal and the reason this hamlet ever mattered.

When the mine closed in 1930 the miners left for Bilbao or Barcelona. Their houses stayed, built tight against winter that can begin in October and linger until May. Roofs are steep enough to shed snow, chimneys wide enough for oak logs, walls half a metre thick. Step inside the parish church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción and the temperature drops another five degrees; the granite blocks were hauled here by mules in the 1300s, the bell-tower added once silver paid for it. Inside, the only colour is a faded blue fresco of the Virgin whose face someone scratched out during the Civil War. No guide, no ticket desk, just a printed card asking visitors to close the door against swifts.

What You Actually Do Here

You walk. A way-marked loop, the Sendero de las Minas, circles the village in ninety minutes, dipping through holm-oak and rebollón oak where wild boar root for acorns. The path is clear but stony; after rain the schist turns greasy. For something longer, the GR-86 long-distance trail passes the top of the village and rolls 18 km east to Majaelrayo, a day’s hike across empty moorland where the only water source is a shepherd’s tap outside a ruined cortijo. Carry more than you think you need; summer temperatures may look mild on the forecast—25 °C feels hotter at this altitude when there is no shade.

October brings mushroom pickers. Níscalos (saffron milk-caps) flush under the pines after the first storms; locals carry curved knives and buckets, greeting strangers with polite suspicion. Joining them without a permit risks a €300 fine, but the bar-owner at Mesón Sabory will happily buy your legal haul and fry them in garlic for supper.

Eating When the Bells Stop

There are two bars. One opens at 07:00 for coffee and churros, shuts at 14:00, reopens 18:00-21:00. The other is Mesón Sabory on Plaza Mayor, a slate-floored room where the television stays off and the menu is written on a chalkboard in thick Castilian. Order the cabrito asado—milk-fed kid roasted until the skin crackles like pork crackling, the meat somewhere between spring lamb and chicken. A half portion feeds two; a full portion could service a family of four and still leave leftovers for the dog. Vegetarians get a plate of pimientos de Padrón and migas—fried breadcrumbs with grapes, surprisingly good if you accept that everything here is cooked in mutton fat. House red comes from the Uclés cooperative, fruity and gulpable at €12 a bottle; ask for “medio” if you only want half, otherwise they’ll bring the whole litre.

Lunch starts at 14:30 sharp. If you arrive at 15:15 the kitchen is already wiping down. Sunday lunchtime fills with families from Sigüenza who drive up for the goat and the cool air; mid-week you may share the room with two old men playing dominoes and a cat asleep on the oven.

The Seasonal Bargain

Come between May and mid-June and the surrounding meadows are a haze of lavender and poppies, the temperature a perfect 22 °C. Nights drop to 10 °C—bring a fleece. July and August are hotter but still bearable; Spanish families flee the oven of the capital and book the village’s dozen rural houses. Book early or you’ll sleep in Sigüenza, forty minutes away down the mountain. September is golden and empty; October smells of mushrooms and woodsmoke. After that the place locks up. January regularly hits –10 °C, the narrow streets turn to ice rinks and the only accommodation closes until Easter. If you do winter-drive, chains are compulsory and the CM-1001 is occasionally closed after snow. The upside: you get the entire village to yourself, plus the eerie pleasure of watching your breath freeze inside a twelfth-century church.

Getting Out Again

There is no petrol station. The nearest 24-hour pump is in Sigüenza; the village shop sells 5-litre cans in an emergency but charges motorway prices. Monday and Tuesday outside high summer everything shuts—no bar, no bread van, no bakery smell drifting through the streets. Phone coverage is patchy; download offline maps before you leave the A-2. Buses exist on Tuesday and Friday only, one departure each way, timed for pensioners collecting prescriptions. Otherwise you drive, or you thumb a lift with a farmer. Most visitors stay two hours, eat goat, photograph the mine scar and leave. That is enough to tick the box, but stay overnight and the place starts to work on you: the silence after 23:00 is so complete you hear your own pulse, and the Milky Way feels close enough to snag on the church roof.

Hiendelaencina will not change your life. It offers no epiphany, no Instagram moment that hasn’t already been snapped by the couple from Zaragoza at the next table. What it does offer is a slice of Castilian upland life priced at pre-tourist rates: coffee for €1.20, a bed in a stone cottage for €60, and the small, honest pleasure of realising that somewhere on this crowded island continent 115 people still go to bed when the church bell says so, not when Netflix runs out of episodes.