Medranda

Stone Walls and Empty Windows

The church bell strikes noon. Nobody appears. A tabby cat stretches across the church steps, then disappears through a broken wooden gate. Medranda carries on regardless.

At 800 metres above the baking plains of La Mancha, this serrano village holds 68 official residents. Most days feel like Sunday mornings. Stone houses line narrow lanes, their timber balconies sagging under terracotta tiles. Some facades wear fresh ochre paint; others crumble quietly, roofs open to Guadalajara's big sky. It's architecture without architects—whatever stone lay nearby became wall, whatever timber grew became beam.

The silence isn't absolute. Swifts wheel overhead. A tractor coughs somewhere beyond the last houses. But compared with Britain's countryside, where even remote hamlets throb with weekend traffic, Medranda's hush feels almost theatrical. Walk twenty minutes from the village centre and you're alone with holm oaks, wild thyme and the occasional griffon vulture riding thermals above the ridge.

Walking Where Maps Run Out

Proper footpaths? Not really. Instead you'll find traditional drove roads—wide enough for sheep, vague enough to test navigation skills. Head north and a stony track drops into the Cañamares valley, linking abandoned farmsteads whose slate roofs have long since collapsed. Eastwards, a faint trail climbs to the Puerto de la Chaparra, where views open across wave after wave of granite and garrigue. The going is easy; waymarks are not. Download a GPS track before leaving Madrid, pack water, and expect to back-track at least once.

Spring brings the best walking. Temperatures hover around 18 °C, meadows throw up poppies and wild marjoram, and the air carries that clean, resinous smell of wet rosemary. Autumn runs a close second: the holm oaks stay green but the scrub turns copper, and mushroom pickers from Guadalajara city appear at dawn, baskets in hand, hoping for milk-caps under the pines.

Summer is a mixed bag. Daytime heat can top 35 °C by eleven o'clock, turning the landscape white and shimmering. Start early, siesta under an olive, then resume walking at five when the light turns honey-coloured and the thermometer finally loosens its grip. Winter walkers need to check the forecast: snow isn't guaranteed but when it arrives the approach road from Alcolea del Pinar becomes an ice chute. Chains help; common sense helps more.

A Gastronomy of Survival

Medranda itself offers no lunch menus, no craft-ale taprooms, no Sunday roasts. The last village shop closed in 2003; the bakery became someone's living room. For supplies you drive twelve kilometres north to Tamajón where a modest supermarket sells Manchego cheese, tinned beans and the local embutidos—rough-country chorizo flavoured with pimentón de la Vera, and morcilla sweetened with onions rather than rice.

Regional cooking is built around what sheep, pigs and scrub could provide. Expect cordero al horno—shoulder of lamb slow-roasted with garlic and bay until the bone pulls clean away. Expect migas: yesterday's bread fried in olive oil with chorizo scraps and grapes. Expect gachas, a thick maize porridge once eaten by shepherds who spent weeks on the move. Vegetarians can cobble together meals based on pisto (Spain's answer to ratatouille) and the excellent local cheese, but choices shrink outside bigger towns. Book half-board in Tamajón or plan to self-cater.

When the Village Wakes Up

August changes everything. The fiesta patronal—held around the Assumption, usually 14-16 August—draws back former residents from Madrid, Zaragoza, even Geneva. Suddenly there are teenagers in the plaza, strings of coloured bulbs overhead, and a sound system that would shame a small nightclub. The population can swell to 300 for seventy-two chaotic hours. There's mass in the sixteenth-century church, followed by a procession where the statue of the Virgin is carried beneath a canopy of flowers. At night the square fills with long tables, paper tablecloths flapping, and everyone eats caldereta, a stew of goat and mountain herbs, washed down with tempranillo brought up from the Meseta.

If you crave atmosphere, come then. Ear-plugs help. If you came for silence, arrive a week later when the generators fall silent and the only sound is the church door creaking shut again.

Getting There, Staying Sane

Public transport won't get you here. From Madrid's Atocha station take a high-speed train to Guadalajara (30 min, about €14), then rent a car. The A-2 motorway arcs north-east; exit at Alcolea del Pinar and follow the CM-201 through a landscape that grows progressively emptier. The final ten kilometres twist through holm-oak pasture; meeting another car feels like social event. Total driving time from the motorway: 1 h 15 min.

Accommodation is scarce. Closest reliable options are in Tamajón: Hostal El Serranillo offers ten simple doubles for €55 a night, heating included—nights are cool even in July. Alternative bases lie north in the Alto Tajo: rustic casas rurales in Checa or Corduente put you within 40 minutes' drive and offer walking routes with proper signposts and the occasional riverside bar.

Fill the tank before leaving the main road; mountain garages close for lunch and sometimes for entire afternoons. Mobile reception is patchy—Vodafone cuts out in the valley, EE partners survive on one bar if you stand on the church wall. Download offline maps, tell someone your route, and carry a paper backup. The Guardia Civil patrol maybe once a day; breakdown assistance takes its time.

The Honest Prospect

Medranda is not photogenic in the chocolate-box sense. It will never feature on Unesco's tentative list or star in a Netflix travel show. What it offers is a measure of stillness increasingly rare in Europe, plus the small thrill of discovering somewhere Google hasn't yet indexed to death. Come for a morning and you'll leave underwhelmed. Stay for two days, let the sierras rearrange your sense of scale, and you may find ordinary life back home oddly noisy.

Visit in spring when the broom flowers turn whole slopes yellow, or in late October when the first frost sharpens the air and wood-smoke drifts from the handful of permanently occupied houses. Walk, listen, then retreat to Tamajón for a plate of roast lamb and a glass of strong country red. Medranda will still be there, quiet as ever, waiting for the next curious traveller to decide whether emptiness itself can be a destination.