Narros

The morning bakery van brakes at 10 a.m. sharp, hazard lights blinking outside the stone wash-house. By 10:07 the loaf rack is empty and the only queue in Narros has dissolved. For the rest of the day the village soundtrack reverts to wind, the odd tractor and, if school is in, twenty children reciting tables behind the green shutters of the single classroom.

High-plateau life, 1,130 m above hurry

Narros sits on the roof of the province of Soria, halfway between the capital and the Riojan border. The drive up from the A-1 is a masterclass in diminishing traffic: six-lane motorway shrinks to two-lane national, then to the SO-920, a wriggling 25 km strip that gains 400 m of altitude and loses every trace of English-language signage. Mobile signal disappears around the same time. What you gain is breathing space—literally. Even in July the air is thin enough to make the first climb from car to church feel like a mini-work-out, while night-time temperatures regularly demand a fleece.

The village looks west over an ocean of wheat and barley that changes colour hourly: pale gold at dawn, silver when the wind brushes the ears, a brief violet just before dusk. It is scenery built for silence rather than selfies; no dramatic peaks, no river gorges, just the huge Castilian horizon that has been emptying since the 1950s. Narros once housed 200 souls. Today 46 are registered, about half of them retired, and the place feels proportionate—small, but not museum-small. Laundry still hangs between wooden balconies, a 1990s Seat Ibiza with one wing mirror missing dozes outside No. 14, and someone’s cockerel treats the whole calle to free reveille.

Stone, adobe and the smell of firewood

There is no formal “old quarter” because the entire village is the old quarter. Houses are bonded by the same recipe—60 cm stone walls, adobe upper storeys, oak beams tarred black by centuries of cooking smoke. Some have been restored with aluminium windows and pastel renders; others slump gently, their doors wired shut against the wind they call the cierzo. The best way to see them is simply to walk the three streets that fan out from the church like spokes. You will pass the communal oven, still used on feast days for baking the anise-scented rolls called tortas de chicharrones, and the Casa de la Media Naranja, so named because its owner once paid a neighbour with half an orange for helping bring in the harvest. Peek through the iron grille: the ground floor is a museum of farm kit—wooden ploughs, a hand-cranked seed sower, a 1953 radio that still crackles into life when Señor Martín comes to dust.

The Iglesia de San Juan Bautista keeps the same scale—no Gothic spikes, just a modest bell-gable and a door worn soft by centuries of work boots. Inside, the retablo is pure provincial Baroque, gilded but not blinding, and someone has left a plastic vase of plastic roses beneath a 17th-century statue of Saint Anne. The door is normally unlocked only on Sunday at 11 a.m.; at other times you fetch the key from the house opposite whose hanging basket says “Paca” in peeling white paint. She will apologise for the dim light, then insist you climb the narrow stair to the choir where the hymn numbers are still cardboard from 1978.

Walking without a postcard

Narros does not do viewpoints. Instead it offers 360-degree permission to wander. Paths strike out across the fields in four directions, all of them essentially flat, none of them way-marked to British standards. The most satisfying loop heads south-east towards the abandoned hamlet of Navalcruz, 4 km away. You follow a farm track the width of a Land Rover, wheat brushing your knees on both sides. Lark song replaces ring-tone; the only obstacle is the occasional galgo sleeping in the dust. Halfway along you pass a granite column—boundary stone from 1897, its inscription still legible if you scrape away the lichen. Navalcruz itself is a cluster of roofless houses surrounding a still-upright stone cross; in the silence you can hear storks clacking on the chimney pots.

Spring brings the colour—blood-red poppies stitched through the green—while late September turns the plateau into a threshing floor of gold. Winter is a different contract: daylight barely scrapes six hours, the wind can top 70 km/h and drifting snow closes the SO-920 for days at a time. If you fancy a white-out experience, pack snow chains and enough food for two nights; the village shop closed in 2003 and the nearest supermarket is 42 km away in Soria.

Food: timing, not menus

There are no bars, restaurants or souvenir emporia in Narros. The single rural house, La Casona de Narros, has a kitchen you can use, but you must bring ingredients. Shopping is therefore part of the choreography: stock up in Soria before you leave, or phone the weekly mobile grocer (Tuesday and Friday, arrives 11:30, leaves at noon sharp). If you want someone else to do the cooking, drive 10 km north to Almajano where Casa Apolonio serves a chuletón al estilo soriano—1 kg of T-bone flambéed over vine shoots, enough for two hungry walkers. Ask for it “medium”; the default is so rare it might still chew the salad. Vegetarians usually end up on the queso de oveja—Almajano’s ewe’s-milk cheese, firm and nutty rather than the eye-watering strength associated with Manchego. And do try the pan de pueblo, crusty enough to survive a morning in a rucksack, perfect with a jar of local honey instead of the salt-heavy jamón your doctor keeps warning about.

Night skies and Monday lock-down

Darkness here is a substance, not merely an absence of light. Walk 200 m beyond the last street lamp and the Milky Way spills across the sky like someone has knocked over a salt cellar. Shooting stars are so common you stop pointing them out. The trade-off is Monday: both village bars (in Almajano) close, the church is locked and the bakery van takes its day off. Turn up on a Monday in October and you could have the entire plateau to yourself—glorious if you packed supplies, bleak if you were relying on a lunchtime menu del día.

Practical weave

Fly to Madrid from any major UK airport (2 hrs), pick up a hire car and head north on the A-1. After 140 km leave at junction 102 for the N-110 towards Soria, then peel off on the SO-920 signed for Narros. Fuel up before you leave the main road—the last petrol is 25 km back. The final stretch climbs through pine plantations where wild boar wander at dusk; take the bends slowly and dip your lights—locals drive by memory, not by Highway Code. If you prefer a shorter Spanish hop, Ryanair’s Stansted–Zaragoza flight saves 40 minutes of driving. Either way, allow £70–£90 for a three-day compact hire, plus €25 in tolls if you skirt Madrid’s M40.

Accommodation is binary: either you rent La Casona (three doubles, from €120 per night for the house) or you day-trip from Soria where the three-star Soria Plaza Mayor runs £65 a night. Phone signal inside the village is patchy—download offline maps before you set out. And remember the three-village trap: GPS likes to confuse Narros with Narros del Puerto 100 km west; punch in “Narros, Soria” or you will spend the afternoon on the wrong plateau.

Leaving the horizon behind

Stay longer than a couple of hours and the village begins to calibrate your sense of scale. Wheat fields start to feel like oceans, the church bell like a metronome for a slower life. You will not be “busy”, you will not tick off Unesco sites, and you will almost certainly be the only British-registered car within a 30 km radius. That, rather than any rustic fantasy, is Narros’s real offer: a place where the timetable is set by cereal ripening and by how long it takes the sun to drop behind the grain silos. Arrive with a sandwich, a pair of binoculars and no itinerary, and the plateau will return the favour with silence wide enough to hear your own pulse.