Viana de Duero

The road climbs past Almazán until phone signal flickers and dies. At 1,000 metres, Viana de Duero appears—not with a signpost, but with a stone wall where someone has scrawled the population in white paint: 49, though even that feels optimistic. One resident is hanging washing between two 16th-century houses. She nods, unsurprised to see a car with foreign plates. Visitors usually arrive by mistake, GPS confused by the parallel empty lanes that spider across these high plains.

What keeps people here is the same thing that sends weekenders back to Madrid breathless: silence you can almost lean against. Stand in the single square at 3 pm in July and the heat vibrates; the only movement is a pair of storks gliding above the church tower, their wings creaking like old floorboards. Winter tells a different story. When snow blocks the pass to Covaleda, the village can spend two days cut off. Locals stock firewood in September and keep freezers full of chorizo made from pigs that grazed the dehesa below. Electricity cuts are common; the generator behind the ayuntamiento kicks in with a diesel cough that everyone recognises.

The houses explain the altitude better than any guidebook. Walls are a metre thick, windows the size of postcards, roofs weighted with Arab tiles that have survived Atlantic storms drifting in across the Meseta. Some doorways still carry the iron studs that once repelled wolves. Walk the single street at dusk and you’ll smell oak smoke before you see it curling from chimneys. Renovation comes in waves: three façades freshly pointed, the next hollow as a skull, swallows nesting in bedrooms open to the sky. There is no estate agent; sales happen by word of mouth, prices hovering around €30,000 for a full house, less if the roof has surrendered.

For hikers, the village functions as an informal trailhead. The GR-86 long-distance path passes the cemetery, marked only by a granite milestone eroded to a nub. Follow it east for ninety minutes and you drop 400 m to the Duero itself, here a modest river fringed with poplars and noisy nightingales. Mid-week in May you might share the water with a single shepherd moving 200 merino sheep; he’ll wave but won’t slow, conscious of the kilometres still to cover before dark. Return via the ridge and the panorama opens south across the province of Soria: a caramel expanse of cereal fields broken by the occasional copse of holm oak, the colour of olives against soil that Machado described as “la tierra de Castilla, amarienta, seca, sin hojas”.

Bring water. Fountains work only when the council remembers to switch on the pump, roughly May to October. In August the mercury can touch 36 °C; in January it sinks to –8 °C and stays there. The bar, open Saturday evenings if María’s grandson is home, sells Estrella Galicia for €1.50 and little else. Otherwise, supplies come from Almazán, 18 km away on a road that coils like a dropped ribbon. The supermarket there closes at 8 pm sharp; after that, your only hot meal is the roadside venta south of the N-111, where lamb chops arrive sizzling in their own fat and the waiter still remembers the English cyclist who tried to pay with Scottish banknotes.

Festivity is calibrated to population. Around 15 August the village doubles in size as emigrants return from Zaragoza and Barcelona. A sound system appears in the square, powered by cables snaking through the priest’s window. There’s a raffle for a ham, sack races for children who barely know each other, and at midnight a DJ who refuses requests for reggaetón because the mayor’s wife prefers pasodobles. By Tuesday the rubbish lorry has hauled away the empty bottles and only the bunting flaps as proof. In quieter months, tradition shrinks to Sunday mass; the bell rings twice, once for the host, once for the two old ladies who still attend.

Photographers arrive chasing star-scapes. At this elevation and distance from any city of note, the Milky Way shows its full arc by 11 pm. Set a tripod in the square, expose for 25 seconds and the stone glows under a sapphire sky. Just don’t expect comfort: night-time breezes knife through fleece, and the streetlights switch off at midnight to save the council €400 a year. The resulting darkness is total; walk without a torch and you’ll discover how loud your own footsteps can be.

Getting here requires surrendering to the timetable of the Meseta. There is no railway; the closest bus stop is in Almazán, served twice daily from Soria by a coach that also delivers Amazon parcels. Hire a car in Madrid and you face a two-hour dash up the A-2 followed by 40 minutes on the SO-20, a road where wild boar outnumber vehicles after dusk. Petrol stations close at 10 pm; if you arrive late, fill up in Almazán or risk a 40-litre fine the next morning.

Stay, if you must, in one of three privately let houses. The largest sleeps six and has under-floor heating powered by a pellet stove; the owner, who lives in Valladolid, leaves the key under a flowerpot and trusts you to transfer €80 by Bizum when you leave. There is no cleaning fee because there is no cleaner. Sheets smell of sun-dried cotton; towels are mismatched but ample. The alternative is Almazán’s Hotel Valdeosito, functional, €55 a night with breakfast, and a 25-minute mountain drive that feels longer after a bottle of the local tempranillo.

Leave before dawn at least once. The sky pales behind the Sierra de Urbión, turning the wheat stubble first mauve then copper. A covey of partridge breaks cover, wings clattering like snare drums. By the time the sun clears the ridge, Viana de Duero is already small in the rear-view mirror, its church tower the last thing visible before the road dips. The silence lingers longer than the view—an acquired taste, perhaps, but one that makes the engine noise of the motorway feel suddenly foreign.