Casafranca

Granite, Silence and 928 Metres of Attitude

The thermometer drops eight degrees as you climb the final switchback into Casafranca. At 928 metres above sea level, this scatter of stone houses sits precisely where Salamanca's southern sierras shrug off the flat cereal ocean of the Meseta. The air thins, the oak trunks thicken, and the only sound is a tractor grinding uphill in bottom gear. Nobody comes here by accident: the village register lists sixty-nine souls, the bar closed decades ago, and the nearest cash machine is twenty-two kilometres away. That's the point.

British drivers fresh from the A-50 motorway often overshoot the turning at El Tejado; the CL-517 isn't signposted in English, and Google Maps still thinks the road is "seasonal". It isn't, but the tarmac narrows to a single granite-lined lane where wildcats occasionally sprint across the beam of dipped headlights. Leave Salamanca after lunch and you'll arrive before the afternoon cloud piles up against the peaks; leave it any later and you'll meet wild boar on the descent.

Stone Walls Built for Winter

Every house in Casafranca is dressed in the same grey granite hewn from local quarries. Walls are half a metre thick, windows are pint-sized, and roofs sit low against the Atlantic weather that barrels in over the Portuguese border. The architecture isn't pretty – it's practical. Winters here start in mid-October and loiter until May; snow can cut the village off for two-day stretches, and residents still talk about the blizzard of 2001 that left drifts up to the first-floor lintels. Step inside one of the two holiday lets and you'll find wood-burners, electric radiators and the sort of Wi-Fi that gives up when the wind changes direction. Casa Azafrán, the three-bedroom cottage praised by a British guest called Caroline for being "clean and well equipped", costs around £85 a night in low season. Bring slippers: those stone floors suck heat out of socks.

The village layout is simple. One street, one church, one ruined bread oven, and a fountain that has provided drinking water since 1894. There are no museums, no interpretation boards, no gift shops selling fridge magnets. Instead you get a 270-degree view across the Entresierras, a rumpled carpet of dehesa oak that stretches south until Portugal interrupts it. On clear days the granite bulk of the Sierra de Gata floats on the horizon like a half-finished watercolour.

Walking Without Waymarks

Official hiking routes stop at the municipal boundary, which suits the handful of British ramblers who appear each spring armed with OS-style maps and a thermos. Unmarked cattle tracks fan out from the top of the village, contouring through sweet-chestnut and holm-oak before dropping into the valley of the River Huebra. A circular tramp to the abandoned hamlet of Villar de Ciervo takes three hours, gains 350 metres of height and offers decent odds of seeing griffon vultures riding the thermals above the cliffs. After rain the path turns into a clay toboggan; approach shoes are fine in summer, but winter demands boots with tread. Nobody will rescue you: mobile reception flat-lines in the first gully.

Autumn brings a different crowd. October weekends see car boots decorated with wicker baskets as Spanish families sneak in to hunt níscalos and boletus under the oaks. The rules are strict: two kilos per person, no raking the leaf litter, and absolutely no commercial sale. Foreigners are welcome provided they carry the same free permit available from the provincial website; print it before you leave home because the village has no printer, no council office and, on Mondays, no phone coverage at all.

Where Lunch is Twenty-Three Kilometres Away

Casafranca has no shop, no bar, no bakery and no petrol station. The last grocery van rattled through in 2018 and never returned. Self-catering is therefore mandatory, which means a supermarket sweep in Salamanca before you leave. The nearest edible rescue is in Vitigudino, twenty-three kilometres north, where Bar Imperial serves a respectable menú del día – three courses, wine and a half-carafe of coffee – for €12. Expect jamón ibérico, migas (fried breadcrumbs with garlic) and a slab of leche frita that would give Mary Berry nightmares. Vegetarians get tortilla or, on Thursdays, a plate of roast peppers. Booking isn't necessary except during the August fiestas when half of Madrid appears to rediscover its grandparents' village.

If you insist on eating within walking distance, the stone hut opposite the church hosts a weekend asador during July and August. A retired couple from Seville fire up the oak coals and grill half-chickens until they run out, usually around 4 p.m. Bring your own cutlery, wine and, ideally, a Spanish speaker to negotiate queue etiquette.

The Return of the Emigrants

For eleven months the village clock strikes mainly for the benefit of sheep. Then, on the second weekend of August, population swells to roughly four hundred. The fiestas patronales drag back emigrants from Basel, Geneva and Swindon; suddenly every doorway disgorges folding tables, oil-cloth tablecloths and cousins who haven't met since 1997. The programme is reassuringly retro: Saturday evening mass followed by a foam party in the concrete plaza (DJ imported from Ledesma), Sunday lunchtime paella for ninety cooked in a pan the size of a satellite dish, and a Monday procession where the statue of the Virgin is carried fifty metres from church to fountain and back again. Tourists are tolerated, even welcomed, but accommodation is impossible unless you booked the village house in January. Day-trippers can buy plastic cups of beer for €1 from a hatch in somebody's garage; bring small change because nobody has ever seen a fifty-euro note.

Getting Out Alive

The practical bit. Fly to Madrid or Valladolid, hire a car, and allow two hours on fast roads plus forty minutes of mountain switchbacks. Petrol gauges below half invite anxiety: night-time stations are rarer than English speakers. Winter tyres are not mandatory, but the CL-517 ices over above 800 metres; carry a blanket and a shovel between December and March. Spring and autumn deliver the kindest light and the fewest flies, though Easter week can be startlingly cold if the Atlantic sends a norte. Summer tops out at 32 °C but the altitude keeps nights breathable; still, pack a fleece because 12 °C at midnight is normal.

Leave the car in the plaza, lock it, and walk. The only thing you can buy here is silence, and even that runs out when the church bell tolls the hour. Head north on the stony track at dawn and you'll understand why nobody ever built a hotel on this ridge: the view is already accommodation enough.