La Carrera

The tractor pulling a trailer of hay is wider than the single-track road, so you reverse 200 metres until the stone wall offers a scrape of wing-mirror clearance. The driver lifts two fingers from the steering wheel without looking up. This is La Carrera: traffic works on livestock priority and the day is timed by the bell in the squat parroquial tower, not by Google Calendar.

Altitude 1,048 m, population 157, province of Ávila—numbers that explain why most British maps leave the village as a blank space between Madrid and Salamanca. The blankness is the point. Weekenders after souvenir shops or Moorish palaces carry on to the A-50; those who turn off at junction 109 discover a granite settlement that still functions as it did before rural Spain emptied.

Stone walls the colour of weathered sheep’s wool line lanes barely two metres wide. Adobe houses have wooden balconies sagging with geraniums, but the ground floors are working stables: you smell straw and horses before coffee. Peek through an open portón and you’ll see a cobbled courtyard, a hayloft ladder propped exactly where grandfather left it, and perhaps a teenage girl WhatsApp-ing friends in Madrid while the mule beside her munches alfalfa. Nobody stages “authenticity” here; they just never got round to faking it.

Walk uphill past the church and the village ends abruptly at a cattle grid. Beyond lies the dehesa—open oak pasture that unrolls for kilometre after kilometre until the Sierra de Ávila forms a saw-toothed horizon. Spring brings a scatter of purple lupins and white asphodels; in October the grass turns the colour of pale ale and acorns drop for the free-range Iberian pigs whose ham sells for £90 a leg in London delicatessens. Follow any farm track for twenty minutes and you are unlikely to meet another human, though red kites overhead provide running commentary.

If you prefer your exercise horizontal, several old drove roads link La Carrera with neighbouring hamlets. The path to Nava del Barco is 7 km of gentle descent through oak and broom; stout shoes are enough, and the only navigation aid needed is “keep the valley on your left”. Mountain-bike tyres find the same routes rideable—gradients hover around 5 %, perfect for cyclists who like scenery without oxygen debt. Carry a spare inner tube: the nearest bike shop is 40 km away in Ávila.

Food follows the logic of cold winters and long walks. Lunch at Bar Silver, the village’s only café, might be grilled pork secreto (the marbled shoulder cut Brits rarely see) and patatas revolconas—paprika mash stiff enough to hold its shape on a fork. The owner, Jesús, learned English picking strawberries in Kent and will happily explain why the local Avileña beef stays tender at altitude. A weekday menú del día costs €12 for three courses, bread and a glass of strong red; card payments are accepted, but the machine sulks when the wind blows. Come on a Monday and you will go hungry—both bars close so the families can slaughter a pig.

That domestic rhythm shapes the year. August drags emigrants back from Madrid; the plaza fills with folding tables for the fiesta patronal and the village’s decibel count quadruples. By mid-September only the retired and the schoolchildren remain, plus a handful of British second-home owners who discovered they could buy a four-bedroom stone house for the price of a garage in Surrey. One Bristolian couple admit they arrived for coffee, stayed for lunch, and signed the deed a month later; they now spend October weekends foraging mushrooms and evenings learning Spanish from a 79-year-old neighbour who remembers when the road was dirt.

Winter is serious at a thousand metres. Night temperatures dip below –8 °C and the N-502 can ice over; bring snow socks if you plan to visit between December and February. The reward is cobalt skies, wood-smoke that smells of holm oak, and a silence so complete you notice your own heartbeat. The parador at Gredos, 25 km up the valley, offers spa access for €25 day passes—handy when the cottage heating takes three hours to catch up.

Practicalities first: fill the tank at the Ávila ring-road services; the last petrol is in Piedrahíta, 18 km away, and it shuts on Sundays. Cash is king—La Carrera’s solitary ATM swallowed a resident’s card in 2022 and nobody has fixed it. Accommodation inside the village is limited to one self-catering cottage booked by phone; otherwise the nearest beds are in Piedrahíta’s Hotel Fonte da Cova, a converted textile mill with riverside rooms at €70 B&B. Madrid airport to La Carrera is 145 km on fast dual-carriageway; allow two hours including the compulsory coffee stop at the Ávila service area where the tortilla is sliced to order.

Guidebooks call this part of Castilla “empty Spain”; locals prefer “Spain that breathes”. There are no ticketed attractions, no audio guides, no craft market flogging fridge magnets. Instead you get an hour talking to a shepherd who explains why his 200 sheep wear different bells, and a night sky still dark enough to confuse the Plough with a saucepan. If that sounds like too little, stay on the motorway. If it sounds like just enough, set the sat-nav, queue behind the hay trailer, and wait for the church bell to tell you when lunch is ready.