Ujados

The road to Ujados climbs past the last service station at Tamajón, then forgets what tarmac feels like. For twenty minutes the track narrows, corkscrewing through pine and oak until stone roofs appear like a geological accident. You have reached one of the highest settled points in Guadalajara province, a village that sits a full degree colder than the baking plateau far below and where, on a clear February morning, your breath freezes before it clears the car window.

A Village that Refuses to Flatten

At 1,152 m above sea level, Ujados is built for winter. Walls are a metre thick, doorways face south-east to trick the dawn sun indoors, and every chimney is capped with a stone hat to stop updrafts. The census claims twenty-seven residents, but even that figure feels generous on a weekday when most neighbours are tending goats or chopping firewood somewhere in the forest. Walk the single main street at 15:00 and the loudest noise is the metallic click of a temperature gauge expanding on a balcony.

The houses are not quaint; they are functional fossils of 18th-century mountain engineering. Granite blocks, hand-split chestnut beams, lime mortar the colour of old bone. Several roofs have collapsed inward, letting sunlight streak across interior walls last painted during Franco’s time. Yet next door someone has mended a gutter, hung geraniums in a rusty olive-oil tin and parked a tidy Seat León outside. The message is clear: decay is tolerated, abandonment is not.

Forests Older than the Nation State

Leave the church of San Bartolomé by its north door and you step straight onto the Camino del Puerto, a drovers’ path first charted in 1342. Within five minutes the village is invisible and the only marker is the occasional cut-wolf footprint hardened into dried mud. The forest here is dominated by Scots pine and rebollo oak, managed so lightly that some trunks measure two arm-spans. Jays rattle through the canopy; wild boar turn earth just out of sight; every so often a roe deer freezes, one white scut the only movement in a cathedral of vertical trunks.

Spring arrives late. Snow can linger on northern slopes until early May, postponing the mushroom season but extending the window for hearing woodpeckers drum. By July the shade is so deep that hikers sometimes carry a fleece at midday, a surreal requirement only two hours from Madrid’s 40 °C furnace. Come October the forest floor becomes a paint-box of saffron milk caps and bloody milk caps—both edible, both eagerly collected by weekenders armed with curved knives and the statutory permit (€9.50 from the regional website, printable on A4 and honoured if you meet the rare forest guard).

When the Electricity Fails, the Stars Clock In

Ujados has no shops, no bar, no mobile coverage worth the name. What it does offer is darkness so complete that on moonless nights the Milky Way throws a shadow. Amateur astronomers arrive with red-lens torches and equatorial mounts, setting up on the disused threshing floor where stone walls block the headlights of the occasional passing 4×4. At 02:00 Orion stands vertical above the Sierra de Pela, and satellites crisscross like polite beetles. The cold is penetrating even in August; thermos tea is shared wordlessly, nobody wanting to break the spell.

Winter turns the same space into a launch pad for snow-shoe loops. A modest dump of 20 cm is enough to silence the road entirely; the Mail van stops attempting the climb and locals ski to their hay stores. Drifts sculpted by northerly winds create blue-walled corridors between pines—photogenic, yes, but also disorientating. GPS tracks downloaded in Guadalajara town often drift 30 m here, so visitors are advised to carry a paper 1:25,000 map (Adrados 451-4, €9) and the common sense to turn back before the afternoon gloom.

One Fiesta, Two Days, Fifty Extra Heartbeats

San Bartolomé, 24 August. Former residents drive up from Madrid, Valencia, even Barcelona, reversing camper vans into the same barns their grandparents fled in the 1950s. A sound system balanced on a pallet belts out pasodobles; someone produces a plastic paddling pool for toddlers; the village priest says mass at 20:00 sharp, after which folding tables appear as if by conjuring. The menu never changes: gazpacho manchego (a meat-and-flatbread stew unrelated to Andalusian gazpacho), chuletón beef weighing a kilo per rib, and empanadillas stuffed with cabello de ángel jam. Wine arrives in five-litre plastic jerrycans, price negotiated by the honour system—leave your €6 in the shoebox.

By midnight the youngest have paired off along the church wall, echoing courtship rituals their great-grandparents enacted under identical stars. At 04:00 the generators cough into silence, and by dawn the only evidence is a scattering of foil ashtrays stiff with wax and the lingering smell of garlic. The population will drop back below thirty before the sun clears the pine ridge.

Getting There, Staying Warm, Leaving Quietly

The practicalities are simple but non-negotiable. Fill the tank at Torremocha del Campo; the last fuel after that is forty-five kilometres away in Sigüenza. Bring all food—even bread, because the daily van no longer climbs the hill. Mobile data flickers on the highest rock above the cemetery if you stand on one leg and face north-east; otherwise surrender to disconnection. The nearest beds are in Majaelrayo (25 min drive), a granite hamlet with two small hostals (doubles €55–€70, heating extra). Wild camping is tolerated in the pine belt provided you arrive after dusk, leave at dawn and carry all litter back to the car.

In heavy snow the Guardia Civil sometimes closes the CM-1016 at kilometre 34; chains are mandatory even for 4×4 vehicles. Conversely, July afternoons can reach 32 °C despite the altitude—pack water, there are no fountains above the village. Finally, remember that every shuttered house still belongs to someone. Peer, photograph, even sigh wistfully, but do not force doors or picnic in courtyards; the heirs return, and they notice.

Drive away at dusk and Ujados shrinks to a single lit window, a fragile orange rectangle nailed to a black mountainside. Ten minutes later the forest swallows even that. You descend towards the motorway, restored phone signal, and the familiar soundtrack of podcasts and petrol stations. Somewhere up there the wind keeps combing the pines, indifferent to whether anyone hears it or not.