Villanueva de San Carlos

The 700-metre View

Seven hundred metres above sea level, the wind arrives earlier than the traveller. It crosses the Campo de Calatrava’s volcanic shield, skims vineyards and cereal stubble, then slips between single-storey houses, rattling the ironwork on stable doors. From the simple parish square you can watch it coming: a faint ochre haze on the horizon, then a drop in temperature that makes cardigans necessary even in June. At this altitude the nights stay cool whatever the thermometer reads in Ciudad Real, 95 kilometres away, and that thermal surprise is often the first thing visitors mention after the silence.

Villanueva de San Carlos is not on the way to anywhere famous. The CM-412 county road simply ends here, looping round the church and heading back out to the N-430. Turn up that lane and you reach a settlement of 278 permanent residents, a number that swells to perhaps 430 when August returnees fire up generators in locked-up houses. There is no medieval castle, no Miró foundation, no artisanal chocolate museum—just grain silos, a modest bar plastered with bullfighting posters, and streets wide enough for tractors to perform three-point turns. In other words, the place is ordinary, and therefore useful if you want to remember what interior Spain felt like before the photographers arrived.

Brick, Whitewash and the Smell of Sheep

Houses are built from local brick the colour of rusted ploughshares, then limed annually so the sun doesn’t bake the mortar out of the joints. The result is a soft pink showing through chalk, like Calpol on a child’s tongue. Windows are small—heat management before air-con—and front doors still have the original wooden hatches so you could, if etiquette allowed, lead a mule straight into the hall. Peek through an open gate and you’ll see the classic Manchego floor plan: a strip of cobbles, a trellis of malvarrosa grapes, then the animal enclosure now converted into a toolshed. Cement mixers sit where oxen once waited.

Because the village sits on a low basalt ridge, lanes tilt gently in two directions. Five minutes uphill brings you to the cemetery wall; five minutes down ends at the concrete trough where local shepherds wash pesticide sprayers. Between those two points the only commerce is La Encomienda, a combined grocer’s and bar that opens at seven for coffee and closes at ten with the television still blaring. On Mondays it often doesn’t bother, so anyone arriving by hire car should stock up in Almagro first—bread, manchego curado, some of those tough little olives that taste of fennel and smoke. Prices run roughly: loaf €1.40, cheese wedge €3.50, caña of beer €1.20. Cards are accepted, grudgingly.

Walking the Calatrava Crust

The surrounding landscape is what vulcanologists politely call “monogenetic”—more than 300 small cones and craters pimpling the plain, most of them now ploughed flat. From the village you can follow the sign-posted PR-CU-93 footpath south-east towards the Laguna de la Alberquilla, a shallow volcanic lagoon ringed by reeds. The track is a farm access road, so expect to step aside for the occasional John Deere; allow ninety minutes each way and carry water, because shade is theoretical. In April the fields glow emerald with young wheat; by July they have bleached to the colour of straw hats, and the only sound is hoopoes calling from the telegraph wires.

If you prefer circular routes, drive ten minutes to the base of the Cerro de la Yezosa, a perfect miniature cone now planted with vines. A rough track spirals to the crater rim where you can sit on basalt blocks and look north to the slate roofs of Villanueva, south to the wind turbines of the Montes de Ciudad Real. The climb takes twenty minutes; trainers are adequate, but the rock is sharp so leave the flip-flops in the boot. Winter walkers should note that at 700 m the plateau collects cloud: temperatures can hover at 3 °C while the coast basks at 20 °C, and mud forms a sticky marl that doubles the weight of your boots.

Where to Sleep (and Why You’ll Eat in the Kitchen)

Accommodation is limited to three rural casas scattered outside the nucleus. Casa Rural Cerromolino, 3 km west, has the only pool advertised in English and accepts two-night bookings from around £70. Expect patchy 4G, enthusiastic dogs next door, and a barbecue that hasn’t seen a wire brush since 2014. Closer in, two Airbnb cottages occupy former labourers’ houses among the olive groves; they offer star-filled skies and absolute silence, but also thin walls and the knowledge that the nearest hospital is half an hour away. None provides breakfast, so plan on buying supplies the previous evening and brewing your own café con leche while swallows ricochet overhead.

Dining out means driving. Almagro’s Plaza Mayor has four restaurants serving the regional repertoire: pisto (pepper and aubergine stew), caldereta de cordero (lamb casserole), and gachas manchegas, a thick porridge spiced with sweet paprika. The set lunch at Casa Paco hovers round €14 and includes a half-bottle of Valdepeñas red; book on weekends when theatre-goers flood in for the Corral de Comedias. Closer options are thin: the petrol-station bar in Bolaños de Calatrava does surprisingly good tortilla, but closes before 21:00, so don’t dawdle over the aperitif hour.

August Fireworks and Winter Furnaces

Festivity here follows the agricultural calendar. The fiestas patronales kick off on 15 August with a procession, a brass band that has clearly seen better valves, and a communal paella cooked in a pan the size of a satellite dish. Visitors are welcome to buy a ticket (€8) and queue for platefuls of rice, rabbit and garrofón beans while villagers debate rainfall statistics. Fireworks follow, launched from the waste ground behind the school; bring a jumper because the thermometer can dip to 14 °C once the rockets stop.

Winter, by contrast, is introspective. The council installs a belén (nativity scene) inside the church, complete with running water and miniature shepherds wearing brown ponchos. On 6 January the Three Kings distribute sweets from the back of a tractor, children shrieking, adults clutching paper cups of aniseed liqueur that tastes like liquid liquorice. If you come then, pack tights and wind-proof coat: the plateau funnels icy air from the Cuenca mountains, and most houses rely on log-burners that chuck out dust as well as heat.

When Silence Becomes the Attraction

Tourism literature likes to promise “authenticity” as if it were a purchasable commodity. Villanueva de San Carlos offers something less marketable but more useful: a place where the loudest noise at midday is a blacksmith repairing a ploughshare, and where the evening sky is still dark enough to spot the International Space Station arcing overhead. Bring Spanish phrases, an all-weather jacket, and expectations set to “low but curious.” You will leave with calf muscles tight from basalt tracks, a camera roll full of wheat horizons, and the memory of a wind that smells faintly of sulphur and sheep—proof that you stepped onto the volcanic spine of La Mancha and let it speak in its indoor voice.