Fontiveros

At 887 metres above sea level the wind arrives first, flattening the wheat and rattling the storks’ nests that crown every roof. Fontiveros sits on a slight ripple of land, just enough height to let you grasp how enormous the Castilian sky really is. One medieval tower, two bars, three streets and a single cash machine: numbers that shrink further when the midday bell strikes and even the dogs vanish into shade.

This is the village that gave Spain its most searching poet. Juan de Yepes – later San Juan de la Cruz – was born here in 1542, and the place still feels like the training ground for his later conviction that the soul grows in quietness rather than spectacle. If you come expecting gift-shop mysticism you’ll leave disappointed. The draw is simpler: a chance to walk for half an hour without hearing anything louder than a tractor in the next field.

The house where the silence started

The Casa Museo de San Juan de la Cruz occupies what locals believe to be the poet’s birthplace, a low adobe dwelling whose walls are the colour of dry biscuits. Inside, the rooms are sparsely furnished – a rope bed, a clay water jug, a copy of Coplas hechas sobre un éxtasis de harta contemplación open at the stanza that compares the soul to “a lone bird on an empty plain”. Admission is free but the door is normally locked; ring the number pinned to the wood and the custodian cycles over from two streets away. She’ll apologise for the wait even if it’s under five minutes, then talk you through the exhibits with the unhurried pride of someone who knew the poet personally.

Across the plaza the Iglesia de San Cipriano keeps the font where the infant was baptised. The tower leans slightly, worn by centuries of freeze-thaw and stork droppings. Inside, the air smells of candle wax and stone dust; light filters through alabaster panes, landing on pews that have been rubbed smooth by generations of jackets. The church follows the Castilian timetable: open at 10, bolted by 14:00, reopened at 17:00 if the sacristan remembers. Arrive mid-afternoon and you’ll photograph a closed door; arrive at dusk and you may catch the choir rehearsing medieval psalm tones that sound uncannily like Northumbrian plain-song.

A landscape that refuses to shout

Fontiveros is ringed by La Moraña, a plateau-wide ocean of cereal that changes colour with the farming calendar: emerald in April, gold bullion by late June, then stubble the colour of burnt toast until the autumn plough. There are no dramatic gorges, no vineyards etched into terraces, just an uncompromising flatness broken only by the occasional poplar windbreak. British walkers on the Camino Teresiano call it “the Meseta in miniature”, warning that the openness can feel oppressive when the sun ricochets off the soil. Take water even for the 3-kilometre loop to the ermita of Nuestra Señora de Sanchomillos; shade is measured in single trees.

The ermita itself is a plain brick barn of a building, locked year-round, but the walk is worth it for the moment the village drops away and you realise how high you really are. On clear days the Gredos peaks stand out like broken molars on the southern horizon; in July they remain snow-tipped while the plateau beneath simmers at 32 °C. Turn 180 degrees and you’ll spot the blur of the A-50 motorway, a reminder that Madrid is only ninety minutes away – yet out here the dominant sound is still the wind combing through barley.

When everything closes

Siesta is non-negotiable. By 14:10 the bakery’s metal grille is down, the lone ATM has switched its screen off, and even the storks seem to fold their wings. The single bar that stays open, Pub Fusión, becomes the village’s communal living room. Order a caña and you’ll get a free tapa of patatas revolconas, a smoky paprika mash studded with scraps of chorizo – comfort food that a Lancashire farmer would recognise if it came with a pie crust. They serve chuletón too, a rib-eye the width of a paperback that arrives sizzling on a terracotta tile; allow €24 and bring a friend or you’ll be defeated halfway.

Between lunch and 17:30 the streets belong to the occasional pilgrim and the municipal street-cleaner who sweeps the same fifty metres in slow, hypnotic passes. If you’ve timed your bus badly this is the dead zone: too late to leave, too early to check in. The solution is to sit on the plaza’s stone bench and practise what the Spanish call hacer tiempo – literally “to do time” – watching clouds cast shadows that travel faster than any vehicle here.

Getting stuck (and getting out)

Public transport is honest about the village’s size. From Ávila there are two buses a day: one at dawn, one at dusk. Miss the 16:00 return and you’re looking at a €35 taxi ride or an unscheduled night. Sunday has no service at all, which is why the handful of guest rooms – above the bar, next to the convent – rarely sell out. Drivers fair better: the A-50 spur delivers you to the edge of town in twenty-five minutes from Arévalo, though the final kilometre narrows to a lane built when cars had horse dimensions. Park on Plaza de España where the kerbs are forgiving and the parking ticket machine has never worked, according to locals.

Winter access can be theatrical. At 900 metres snow arrives earlier than in Madrid, and the plateau wind drifts it across the road in ribbed patterns like frozen surf. Chains are rarely needed for more than a day, but the village school still closes if the bus from the next hamlet can’t climb the slope. Conversely August sun is brutal; stone walls radiate heat long after dusk, and the bar runs out of ice by 22:00. Spring and early autumn are the kindest seasons, when daylight stretches and the wheat smells almost biscuity.

Beyond the poet – if you have wheels

Fontiveros works as a pause rather than a destination. With a car you can thread together the small Moraña towns: Arévalo for its Mudéjar churches and dulcerías selling yemas that pre-date the Reconquista; the brick-built granaries of Navalcarnero; or the lonely castle of Mormojón, half-swallowed by private farmland. None will keep you longer than an hour, but the driving lanes are empty and the wheat horizons make even petrolheads slow down. Cyclists appreciate the gentle gradients – rare in a region where everything usually points uphill – though water bottles empty fast under the high-altitude sun.

Back in Fontiveros the day ends as it began, with the wind. Swifts cut arcs between the church towers, the bar shutters slam, and the streetlights – fitted with bulbs from the 1980s – cast an orange glow that stops at the first corner. Stay the night and you’ll hear the 02:00 lorry heading for the baker’s, then nothing until the storks start clacking at dawn. It isn’t spectacular, and that, you suspect, is exactly what kept a young boy listening to the inside of his own head rather than the outside world.