Santiuste

The village noticeboard still advertises a fiesta that happened three years ago. Nobody has bothered to take it down, because in Santiuste the calendar moves to the rhythm of seasons, not social-media feeds. At 960 metres above sea level, on the roof of the Serranía de Guadalajara, this scatter of stone houses is home to barely fifteen permanent souls. The silence is so complete you can hear a car coming five minutes before it arrives.

A geography lesson in stone

Leave the A-2 at Alcolea del Pinar and the tarmac narrows immediately. For the next 45 minutes the CM-1016 twists through wheat, then pine, then sudden drops into oak-lined gullies. Phone coverage quits after Robledillo de Mohernando; by the time the road signs point left to Santiuste, Google Maps has given up too. Park on the thin strip of gravel before the first house—there is no car park, and the single lane beyond is designed for donkeys, not hire cars.

What you see is a textbook of Castilian mountain building: schist walls barely two storeys high, Arabic tiles weighted with stones against the wind, timber balconies that have turned silver with sun and frost. Nobody has painted a facade in living memory; the colour comes from lichen and the amber light that bounces off the surrounding cornfields. In late June the plateau is still green, but by mid-July the landscape burns to the colour of digestive biscuits and the temperature swings from 14 °C at dawn to 34 °C soon after noon.

The church that named the place

Iglesia de San Justo y San Pastor squats at the top of the only street wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Built from the same grey rock as every house, it is easy to miss until the bell—dated 1789—strikes the hour with a clang that makes redstarts explode from the roofline. The door is usually open; inside, the air smells of candle grease and sun-baked timber. A single nave, no transept, walls whited with lime wash so thick it has started to craze like old porcelain. The altar cloth is embroidered with wheat sheaves, a reminder that the tithe here was paid in grain, not coin.

Walk round the back and you find the cemetery, still in active service. Plastic flowers fade quickly at this altitude; the marble plaques honour men who died in the 1950s and women who lived to 102. Read the surnames aloud—Hernández, Hita, Gómez—and you realise every modern inhabitant is related by blood or marriage. Ask politely and the current mayoress (she answers to “Concha” and keeps the keys) will show you the 17th-century baptismal ledger now stored in a kitchen cupboard to keep it from the mice.

Tracks for boots, not flip-flops

Santiuste functions as a trailhead rather than a destination. Three paths leave the village, way-marked with faded yellow slashes that pre-date the GR network. The easiest follows the ridge south to Majaelrayo (7 km, 2 hrs), dropping through stands of Scots pine and emerging onto meadows loud with grasshoppers. The hardest climbs north to the ruined Castillo de Riba de Santiuste, a 20-minute calf-burner up a loose stone track. English signboards still promise an “impressive interior”, but the padlock on the iron gate has rusted solid and the restoration budget ran dry in 2018. The payoff is the platform of rock beneath the keep: from here you can see the entire arc of the Sierra Norte, wheat fields patched between dark forest like something from a mediaeval tapestry.

Bring water—there is no fountain after the village trough—and don’t count on mobile data. The only refreshments are back on the N-320 in Sigüenza, fifteen minutes by car. British hikers accustomed to Ordnance Survey detail will find the local map (1:50 000, Adrados Ediciones) vague on contours; download an offline track before you leave the tarmac.

Night falls; the sky turns on

By nine o’clock the last swallows stall mid-air and the temperature drops ten degrees. Street lighting is a single bulb outside the church, timed to switch off at midnight. Wait twenty minutes for your eyes to adjust and the Milky Way appears as a definite, dusty stripe rather than a poetic metaphor. Shooting stars are so common you stop pointing them out. Astro-photographers set up on the wheat threshing floor at the village edge; the only glow on the horizon comes from Sigüenza’s sodium lamps twenty-five kilometres south-west.

If you stay—there are two village houses let as casas rurales, €70 a night for two, bring your own towels—the soundtrack is owls and, occasionally, a wild boar crunching through the acorns. Concha’s cousin, Jesús, keeps a smallholding on the far side of the lane; his cockerel believes firmly in summer time all year round. Earplugs recommended.

When to come, when to stay away

April and late-September are the sweet spots. Daytime highs sit in the low twenties, nights require a jumper, and the tracks are firm without being dust bowls. In January the road is kept open only as far as the first bend; after snow the village is reachable on foot from the CM-1016, a 3-km trudge that locals tackle with skis lashed to farm tractors. August brings day-trippers from Madrid hunting mushrooms, but even then you can walk for an hour and meet nobody—just don’t expect a café to materialise when hunger strikes.

The patronal fiesta on 6 August is less a parade, more a family reunion. A portable sound system plays 1980s Spanish pop until the generator runs out of petrol; someone grills chorizos on the church steps; the priest says mass to an audience of twelve. Visitors are welcome, but this is not staged folklore—turn up with respect and a bottle of something fizzy and you’ll be invited to join the circle of plastic chairs.

The honest verdict

Santiuste will not change your life. It offers no gift shop, no epic narrative, no sunset that makes the front page of Instagram. What it does offer is a measure of stillness increasingly hard to find on the Iberian peninsula. Come if you are happy to trade entertainment for space, and if you can forgive the minor inconveniences—locked castle, absent loo, patchy signal—that come with places the world has half forgotten. Turn up expecting to be “charmed” and you will leave hungry. Arrive with sturdy shoes, a bag of almonds and an hour to spare, and you might understand why fifteen people refuse to leave.