Añe

The church bell tolls once at noon and the sound carries for miles across cereal plains that shimmer like beaten bronze. In Añe, population seventy, this is the loudest event of the day. The village sits at 875 m on the high plateaux north-east of Segovia, high enough for the air to feel thinner and for winter to arrive early, yet low enough that the summer sun still burns. Most travellers flash past on the CL-601, bound for the better-known walled town of Pedraza fifteen minutes away. Those who turn off find a place that measures time by harvests rather than opening hours.

A Village That Refuses to Perform

Añe does not greet visitors with signposts to car parks or souvenir racks. The only indication that you have arrived is the sudden narrowing of tarmac to a single car’s width and the way the horizon drops away on every side. Houses – some still roofed with terracotta tiles, others open to the sky – press together as if bracing against the wind that scours the plateau. Adobe walls the colour of dry biscuit have softened at the corners; iron balcony grills hang loose like missing teeth. Nothing here has been restored for effect; the decay is honest, and therefore photogenic in a way that curated heritage rarely manages.

Walking is straightforward: enter the village from the west, pass the stone cross whose base is ringed with withered laurel, and you are already in the tiny plaza. The parish church, rebuilt piecemeal between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, closes off the square like a blunt fortress. Its tower is short and square, more watchtower than campanile, built for warning of weather rather than welcoming the faithful. Lean against the warm stone and you realise the façade is exactly the same shade as the soil in the surrounding fields – geology pressed into service as architecture.

What the Fields Remember

Leave the houses behind, take the unpaved lane that heads south, and within five minutes the village looks like a toy someone left on a table. The plateau is not flat in the Norfolk sense; it rolls just enough to hide the next hamlet, so every turn reveals another kilometre of wheat stubble or another stand of holm oaks bent double by the wind. This is dry-farming country: no irrigation channels, just soil and sky negotiating the yield. In April the green is almost Irish; by July the colour has drained to parchment, and dust devils spiral where tractors have turned.

The paths are the old droving routes that linked summer and winter pastures. They are marked on the Spanish IGN maps but not way-marked on the ground; navigation involves keeping the telecom mast on the Cerro del Castillo to your left and remembering that every loop eventually returns to the road. Distances feel elastic because the skyline is so wide: a two-hour circuit to the abandoned cortijo of La Mata can feel like a stroll across a single field until you check the GPS and discover you have walked 7 km. Elevation change is minimal, yet at this altitude strides shorten and a twenty-knot wind can flatten a hiker as effectively as a steep gradient.

Seasons That Decide for You

April and May are the kindest months: daylight from 07:30 to 21:00, temperatures between 12 °C and 22 °C, larks audible above the wind. Come in mid-July and the thermometer can touch 36 °C at three in the afternoon; there is no café to shelter in, no tree big enough for shade. The village water fountain still runs, but the flow is sluggish and tastes of iron; carry two litres per person. October brings stubble-burning and the smell of straw smouldering, while January can glaze the entire plateau with ice that does not thaw until eleven. Snow is infrequent but lethal when it arrives: the local council grits the CL-601, yet the side road into Añe is last on the list and the final kilometre becomes a toboggan run.

What You Will Not Find – and What You Might

There is nowhere to buy food, drink, or postcards. The last grocery closed in 2008; the bakery ovens were bricked up decades earlier. Plan as if you were walking in the Brecon Beacons: pack sandwiches, fruit, and a thermos, then drive ten minutes to Torrecaballeros if you need a bar stool and a cortado. Mobile reception is patchy: Vodafone picks up a single bar on the plaza, Movistar none at all. You will, however, hear kestrels calling above the bell tower and, if you sit still long enough, watch red kites drift in from the pine plantations to hunt voles between the furrows.

Photographers should aim for the half-hour after sunrise, when low light carves every ridge of soil into miniature Badlands. The village roofs face east; tiles glow like cooling embers while the plains beyond remain violet-grey. Sunset is less theatrical – the land falls away to the west and the sun drops clean behind it – but the sky turns the exact shade of a Turner study before the night wind starts to hoot through broken windows.

Getting There, Staying Elsewhere

From Madrid, take the A-1 north to Aranda de Duero, then the N-110 to Sepúlveda and the CL-601 west. The turn-off to Añe is signposted only from the westbound carriageway; miss it and you will reach Pedraza before you realise. Total driving time is ninety minutes if the M-40 behaves. Public transport is non-existent: the weekday bus from Segovia to Caballar stops four kilometres away at 14:15 and does not return until the following morning.

Accommodation is in the surrounding pueblos. In Pedraza, the three-star Hostería de Santo Domingo has doubles from €95; in Ortigosa del Monte, Posada de los Templarios offers smaller rooms at €70 with better insulation against the cold. Camping beside the village is technically allowed under Spanish regional law, but there are no facilities and locals discourage tents because of feral dogs that patrol the farms at night.

A Parting Impression

Leave at dusk and the village shrinks in the mirror until only the tower is visible, a dark hyphen between earth and sky. The plateau smells of thyme and diesel, a reminder that even here the twenty-first century passes through. Añe gives nothing away, yet it charges no admission either. What it offers is a calibration point: a place to check whether your internal clock still matches the slower rhythm of grain ripening and flocks moving. If that sounds like enough, come. If you need lunch on a terrace and a labelled ticket desk, keep driving – Pedraza is fifteen minutes further on.