Villalonso

At 722 m above sea level, Villalonso sits high enough for the air to feel thinner and the horizon wider. Stand on the village edge at dusk and the wheat fields below glow like burnished copper, while the sky—unbroken by hills or high-rise—turns a slow gradient from eggshell to bruised purple. It is the kind of sky that makes you understand why Castilians talk about la meseta as if it were an ocean: nothing blocks the view except the curvature of the earth itself.

Adobe, Clay and Quiet

The settlement is tiny—barely eighty souls—and spreads along a single ridge-road of packed earth and crumbling asphalt. Houses are built from the same red clay they stand on; walls are two-feet thick, the colour of Staffordshire roof tiles, and many still carry the finger-wide grooves left by the wooden forms that shaped the adobe bricks. Chimneys rise at odd angles, brick grafted onto stone, because extensions were added whenever a son married and needed an extra room. There is no architectural uniformity, only the logic of available material and family growth.

Below the houses, half-buried in the slope, lie the village’s old wine cellars—cuevas—dug horizontally into the hillside like wartime shelters. Their ventilation stacks poke up through the grass, giving the fields the look of a submarine cemetery. Most are locked; a few are used to store tractors or potatoes rather than Tempranillo. If you want to look inside, polite Spanish and a bottle of Toro D.O. offered to the owner usually works better than any admission fee.

Walking the Grain

Villalonso is a launch pad rather than a destination. Footpaths radiate across the plateau, following medieval drove roads that once funnelled merino sheep north to León. The ground is dead flat, so navigation is simple: pick a windmill on the horizon and walk. In April the soil is still damp and the wheat only ankle-high; by July it reaches your waist and rustles like dry rain. There is no shade—bring a hat, two litres of water, and factor 30. The reward is solitude: skylarks overhead, the occasional hare bursting from a furrow, and the sense that the landscape has looked exactly like this since the Reconquista.

Loop back via the farm track to Tiedra (6 km) and you can bag a second castle before lunch. The tower at Tiedra is ruined but climbable; stone stairs end abruptly in mid-air, so watch your footing. From the battlements Villalonso appears as a smudge of terracotta among the gold—more geology than architecture.

What You Won’t Find

There is no bar, no shop, no ATM, no petrol pump. Mobile signal drops to one bar if the wind is wrong. Saturday night noise is a tractor reversing. If you need milk after 20:00 you will drive fifteen minutes to Toro. Accept this before arrival or the silence will feel like a reprimand.

Eating Anyway

The village itself offers nothing commercial, yet you can still eat well. In Toro, Bodegas Farina run hourly tastings in English; their ‘Matsu’ range is bottled in squat black glass that wouldn’t look out of place on a Peckham wine bar shelf. The winemaker favours velvet tannins over oak brutality—easy drinking for British palates weaned on Rioja. Across the square, Mesón Villa de Toro will roast a milk-fed lamb (lechazo) until the skin crackles like pork scratching. Ask for it bien hecho if pink juice puts you off; Spaniards consider it heresy, but the kitchen obliges without comment. Judiones—butter beans the size of conkers—come stewed with chorizo and a bay leaf the chef probably picked from the plant outside the door. Lunch for two with a carafe of house red costs €34; they still accept cash only.

Seasons and Access

Spring and autumn are the comfortable windows. April brings green wheat and daytime highs of 18 °C, though nights drop to 5 °C—pack a fleece. July and August bake; the thermometer kisses 36 °C by noon and the wind feels as if it has crossed a pizza oven. Winter is surprisingly sharp: the altitude means frost in November and the occasional dusting of snow that melts before lunch. Roads are gritted promptly—Castilians know how to handle cold—but if snowdrifts coincide with a fiesta, the village can be cut off for 24 hours. Always carry a blanket and a full tank; the nearest motorway junction is 28 km away.

One Castle, One Bell, One Party

The castle is Villalonso’s only formal monument. Built in the fifteenth century from the same russet stone as the houses, it consists of a single square keep and a curtain wall that once enclosed stables now vanished. The interior is empty—no furniture, no interpretation boards—so children can sprint the spiral staircase without tripping over velvet ropes. Visits must be pre-arranged (tel. +34 686 474 915); the caretaker arrives on a moped with a ring of keys and charges €2.50 exact change. Groups under fifteen may find themselves locked out if the custodian assumes no one is coming. Wait on the wall; he usually returns for a second look.

The church bell still rings the Angelus at noon, a single bronze note that carries for miles across the plain. Inside, the nave is dim and smells of paraffin and old cloth. A panel lists Civil War dead on both sides—evidence that even here the conflict cut families down the middle.

On 15 August the village swells to perhaps 300 as emigrant descendants return for the fiesta. A sound system is erected on a flat-bed lorry, and the plaza becomes an open-air kitchen where empanadas are sliced with the same knives used to castrate lambs. Outsiders are welcome but not fussed over; dance if you wish, but no one will ask where you’re from.

Heading Home

Leave at sunrise and the plateau steams as the sun hits the dew. Drive south-east toward Madrid and Villalonso shrinks in the rear-view mirror until only the castle tower is visible, looking like a stone finger raised in mild protest against the vastness. You will not have bought a fridge magnet; you may have spoken fewer than twenty words all weekend. What you take back is the memory of scale—fields too wide for a single photograph, a sky that refuses a ceiling, and the realisation that in parts of Europe still function perfectly well without souvenir shops.