Muñogrande

The only queue you’ll ever join in Muñogrande forms at the petrol pumps beside the A-50. Lorry drivers stand between the pumps, stretching hamstrings and comparing tyre pressures while the automatic coffee machine inside the service area grinds beans that smell better than anyone expects. Beyond the forecourt, wheat stretches to every horizon like an ocean that forgot to move. This is the 940-metre-high plains of La Moraña, and the village—if you can call 76 souls a village—sits on the edge of the carriageway like an afterthought.

Most travellers stop for the loo, not the landscape. They miss the stone-and-adobe houses huddled two minutes up the lane, the single church bell that still marks the hours, and the silence that rolls in once the wagons change gear and disappear west towards Salamanca. Muñogrande is not a detour; it is a five-kilometre detour that feels like fifty once the tarmac ends and the track narrows between sunflower plots. Come in spring and the green is almost Irish; come in July and the colour drains to parchment, the sky bleaches, and the thermometer touches 36 °C by eleven in the morning.

What passes for a centre

There is no plaza mayor, just a widening of the lane where the church wall creates a triangle of shade. The Iglesia de San Miguel is locked more often than not; the priest arrives from Piedrahíta on Sundays and the key stays with Señora Felisa whose front door faces the porch. Knock politely and she will open, provided the television is not too loud inside. The nave is small, whitewashed, and smells of candle wax and stone. A single Baroque retable survives from the eighteenth century, its gilt dulled by centuries of grain dust that drifts in whenever the west door is thrown open. Stand at the altar rail and you can hear the motorway, a low hum like distant bees.

The houses around the church are still inhabited, which is remarkable in a province that has lost half its rural population since 1960. Walls are built from local quartzite, the mortar flush and tidy; roofs of curved terracotta tiles carry the same lichen you see on Dorset barns. Adobe bricks darken after rain, turning the colour of strong tea. Television aerials sprout like weeds, but there is no fibre-optic broadband and mobile coverage drops to 3G if a cloud passes overhead. One garage door has been painted with the cross of St James in yellow, a reminder that the Camino de Madrid once skirted these fields before the kings of León shifted the route northwards.

Walking without waymarks

No gift shop sells walking leaflets, yet the countryside is threaded by farm tracks that link Muñogrande to its bigger neighbours, Muño and Mombeltrán. Set out early and you can complete a twelve-kilometre loop before the sun becomes punitive. The going is flat—this is Castilian steppe, not alpine pasture—so the challenge is meteorological rather than topographical. In April skylarks rise above wheat that sways like water; in August the stubble scratches your ankles and every footstep raises a puff of ochre dust. Boot prints are the only ones in the dust; you will meet more tractors than people.

Cyclists use the same grid of lanes. The secondary road south to Arenas de San Pedro is almost empty before ten o’clock, a rarity in a country where every valley seems to have discovered sportives and Strava segments. Ride east towards Ávila and you clock 40 km of straight before the first bend, the Sierra de Gredos gradually assembling on the horizon like a line of stage scenery. Carry two bidons: the bar at the service station will refill for free, but the next certain water is twenty kilometres on.

Eating, or not

Muñogrande itself has no restaurant, no cider house, no Saturday market. The service-area cafeteria does a serviceable toasted baguette—jamón serrano or processed cheese, your choice—and the coffee is better than the average Welcome Break on the M4. A black coffee and sandwich costs €3.40, cheaper than Madrid airport, dearer than a village bar would be if one existed. For anything more ambitious you drive twenty minutes east to Arévalo, where the mesón La Tahona still roasts suckling pig in a wood-fired oven and pours a solid Ribera del Duero by the glass. Book ahead at weekends: half of Madrid seems to escape north on the A-50 these days.

If you are self-catering, stock up in Ávila before you leave. The supermarket in Arévalo closes on Sunday afternoons, and the village shop in Muñogrande—one room at the back of somebody’s house—opens when the owner feels like it. She sells tinned tuna, UHT milk, and a local soft cheese wrapped in newspaper. Ask for "queso de oveja" and she will cut a wedge with the same knife she uses for parcel string. Refrigeration is optional; the cheese tastes better than it sounds.

Night skies and winter winds

Stay past dusk and the reward is darkness you rarely meet in Britain outside Kielder or mid-Wales. The Milky Way appears as a definite stripe, not a poetic exaggeration. Shooting stars arrive every few minutes in August; wrap up, because the temperature can drop fifteen degrees once the sun disappears. There is no street lighting—one lamp flickers outside the church and the bulb has been missing since Easter—so bring a torch for the walk back to the car. The silence is so complete you hear your own pulse.

Winter is a different proposition. At 940 m the plateau ices over quickly; the track from the motorway becomes a bob-run after dusk and the Guardia Civil close the A-50 at the slightest snow. If you do arrive in February you may have the village to yourself, save for a farmer feeding sheep in the plaza. Chimneys smoke continuously, the air smells of juniper logs, and the church bell sounds muffled, as though the cold has thickened the metal. It is beautiful, but functional only if you have a four-wheel-drive and no tight schedule.

The honest verdict

Muñogrande will never feature on a postcard rack. It offers no boutique hotel, no artisan gin, no Moorish castle to climb for sunset selfies. What it does provide is a swift lesson in how most of inland Spain actually lives: slowly, sparsely, and within earshot of the road that keeps it alive. Stop for petrol, stretch your legs, walk one field edge, and you will have seen everything on the official list. Yet the place lingers in memory precisely because it asks nothing of you beyond presence. Drive away and the wheat closes behind you like water after a ship; the motorway signs count down to Salamanca, and the plateau returns to its private, wind-bitten existence.