Muelas de los Caballeros

The church bells start at seven, though nobody's quite sure why. In Muelas de los Caballeros, population 183, the sound carries clean across the scrubland for miles—past the abandoned threshing floors, past the chestnut trees twisted into impossible shapes by centuries of wind, past the stone wall where someone has scrawled "se vende" in whitewash that's now three years old.

This is farming country, proper farming country, where the earth between your fingers feels like it might've been there since the Reconquista. At 970 metres above sea level, the village sits high enough that your ears pop driving up from Zamora, and the air carries that thin, metallic quality that makes everything seem sharper, more defined. The thermometer reads differently here: minus five in January feels like minus ten, while August's thirty-five somehow feels kinder than the coast's thirty.

The Architecture of Making Do

The parish church squats in the centre like it's been there forever, which essentially it has. Bits of it anyway—the apse dates from the thirteenth century, while that tower with the wonky clock was clearly a later addition, probably around the time someone realised the bells needed somewhere to hang. Inside, the altarpiece tells its own story: gilded wood that's been attacked by woodworm, repainted, attacked again, and repainted once more. The priest only visits twice a month now, so if you want to see it properly, ask at the bar. The owner keeps the key on a nail behind the coffee machine, though she'll want to finish her cigarette first.

The houses follow the same philosophy of gradual accretion. Stone bases support adobe walls that swell and shrink with the seasons, topped with terracotta tiles that have gone the colour of old blood. Some are immaculate—newly pointed stonework, fresh limewash, geraniums in window boxes that someone's clearly fussing over. Others stand empty, their wooden doors hanging off leather hinges, interiors visible through gaps where the render's fallen away. It's not picturesque, whatever that means. It's just what happens when people leave and nobody comes back.

Walk down Calle de la Cruz and you'll pass three generations of architecture in fifty metres: a medieval wine press carved into bedrock, a nineteenth-century house with the family name still visible above the door, and a 1970s bungalow with aluminium windows that someone's trying to sell. The estate agent's sign has faded to illegibility.

Walking Through Empty Country

The tracks leading out of town follow old drove roads, their stone walls built by farmers who had more time than money. Head north towards the Sierra de la Culebra and you'll find yourself alone within minutes—just you, the wind, and occasional evidence that someone's been here before: a rusted ploughshare, a concrete water trough with "1978" scratched into it, a pile of cork oak bark that's been sitting there since someone harvested it who knows when.

Spring brings the best walking, when the broom flowers turn whole hillsides yellow and you can still cross the streams without getting your boots soaked. The PR-ZA 201 trail connects Muelas with Villarino de los Aires, twelve kilometres away through country that feels like it should have eagles circling overhead (it does, mostly griffon vultures, but they only look close because the air's so clear). The path's marked with yellow flashes that someone's taken the trouble to repaint, though you'll still lose it occasionally where it crosses firebreaks or disappears into someone's threshing floor.

Autumn means mushrooms, and local knowledge becomes currency. The good spots are family secrets, passed down like heirlooms, and asking directions to "where the boletus grows" will get you nowhere. If you're determined, hire José from the village—he'll take you out for thirty euros and a bottle of something decent, though he'll pretend not to recognise any edible species until you've been out with him at least twice.

What Actually Gets Eaten Here

The bar does three things properly: coffee, beer, and tortilla. Everything else is negotiable. Try asking for a vegetarian option and you'll get cheese, which will be local and tastes like the goats have been eating wild thyme, but it's still just cheese. The menu changes with the hunting season—partridge in autumn, wild boar when someone's been lucky, rabbit whenever the local population needs controlling.

Breakfast means coffee with a splash of something stronger and toast rubbed with tomato and garlic. Lunch happens at two and involves more meat than you probably wanted, though the lentils come from a farm three kilometres away and taste like they mean it. Dinner's at nine, though the bar might shut early if nobody's about, which happens more often than you'd think.

The shop opens when Concha feels like it, which is usually mornings except Tuesdays, or possibly Wednesdays. She stocks tinned tuna, washing powder, and those Spanish biscuits that come in metal tins. Fresh bread arrives from the bakery in Puebla de Sanabria every day except Sunday, though it sells out fast because everyone buys two loaves, just in case.

Getting There, Getting Away

The road up from Zamora twists through country that gets progressively emptier—villages with populations in double figures, petrol stations that closed years ago, the occasional shepherd who'll wave because there's nobody else to wave at. The CL-527 isn't technically a mountain road, but it'll feel like one when you meet a lorry coming the other way on the switchbacks. In winter, carry chains. Not might-carry, must-carry. When it snows here, it proper snows, and the plough might not reach you until tomorrow, or possibly the day after.

There's no bus on Sundays. There's barely a bus on weekdays—one service that leaves Zamora at seven-thirty in the morning and returns at three, giving you just enough time to walk around the village, have lunch, and realise you've seen everything you came to see. Which is sort of the point.

Accommodation means either the casa rural that Maria inherited from her parents and has done up properly (central heating, proper showers, Wi-Fi that works most of the time), or the other one that hasn't been renovated since the 1980s and still has lace doilies on every surface. Both charge around sixty euros a night, breakfast included, though breakfast at the second place means instant coffee and those individually wrapped sponge cakes that last forever.

The village makes no effort to entertain you. There's no interpretation centre, no guided tours, no craft shop selling fridge magnets. What you get instead is the sound of those bells marking time that doesn't really need marking, the smell of woodsmoke from chimneys that have been smoking since before your grandparents were born, and the gradual realisation that places like this survive not because they're special, but because nobody's bothered to close them down yet.