Villanueva de Gómez

The church bell strikes noon, yet only two cars sit outside the single grocer. At 890 metres above sea level, Villanueva de Gómez feels closer to the sky than to anywhere else—forty minutes northwest of Ávila, surrounded by an ocean of wheat that ripples like water when the wind gets up. This is La Moraña, Castilla y León’s grain basket, where villages are spaced exactly six kilometres apart because that was once a morning’s walk between threshing floors.

A Village that Measures Time in Harvests

Population: 102 on the ayuntamiento website, 5000 if you count every name scratched into the 1950s emigration plaque. The difference matters. Visit in March and you’ll meet more storks than people; come back for the mid-August fiestas and the plaza suddenly holds three generations of returnees, their Madrid-registered 4×4s lined up where tractors usually park.

Adobe walls the colour of dry biscuits absorb the dawn chill. Timber doors, each one a slightly different shade of ox-blood, still carry the iron studs designed to stop bored livestock from scratching their backs to splinters. There is no interpretive centre, no gift shop, no brown road sign pointing the way to “authentic Spain”. Instead you get what villagers call la normalidad: bread delivered every other day, the smell of lentejas drifting from unseen kitchens, and a sky so wide it makes the houses look as though they’re huddling together for warmth.

Walking the Square-Ditch Circuit

Every village on the meseta has its cerca: a square-ditch system first dug in the tenth century to separate arable land from common pasture. Villanueva’s is intact. A flat 4 km footpath follows the line—no way-marking beyond the occasional stone cross rubbed smooth by sheep flanks—giving views back across terracotta roofs to the Sierra de Gredos, snow-capped until late May. Spring brings calandra larks rattling overhead; after midsummer the only sound is the tic-tic of great bustards hidden in the stubble. Allow ninety minutes, take water: the only shade is an abandoned bodega whose roof collapsed under the weight of last decade’s hailstorm.

Cyclists can string together a 42 km loop south to Arévalo on the CV-801, dead-straight and dead-flat—perfect for time-trialists who enjoy headwinds that gust to 40 km/h without warning. Drivers on the same road sometimes discover the wind too: car doors have been known to slam back onto their hinges when parked facing west.

When the Thermometer Plummets

Winter arrives overnight, usually between the 7th and 12th of November. Temperatures drop to –8 °C, the wheat fields turn a metallic grey, and the fog hueca (hollow fog) slides down from the Duero basin, thick enough to muffle the church bell. On those mornings the AV-804 can ice over; the Guardia Civil close it at kilometre 23 and you’ll be diverted via a farm track that adds an hour to Ávila. Pack chains if you’re travelling December–February, and don’t trust the hire-car desk that insists “it never snows this far south”.

Summer compensates—sometimes too much. July afternoons regularly hit 36 °C, shade is non-existent, and the sole village fountain ran dry in the 2017 drought. Locals shift their walks to 07:00; by 11:00 the streets are empty except for swifts screaming overhead. If you insist on midday activity, bring a wide-brimmed hat and the same respect you’d give a 3 km altitude trek—heat exhaustion arrives faster than you expect on the plains.

Eating, or Why You Should Shop First

The grocer’s stock is surprisingly cosmopolitan: tinned squid from Galicia, passata labelled in Arabic (over-order from a restaurant supplier in Arévalo), and the obligatory tower of Cola Cao. Fresh produce is limited to onions, potatoes and whatever the owner’s cousin brings up from the huerta at the weekend. For anything green and leafy, or for wine that isn’t boxed, fill the boot in Ávila’s Mercadona before you leave the ring-road.

Meals themselves happen elsewhere. The village bar closed in 2019 when the leaseholder retired; the nearest asador, La Casona de Arévalo, is a 15-minute drive and serves a chuletón de Ávila the size of a laptop—€28 per kilo, minimum two, cooked over holm-oak charcoal. Their judiones stew arrives in an individual clay bowl, mild enough for tentative British palates; ask for “sin morcilla” if black pudding isn’t your thing. Vegetarians get a pisto manchego—basically ratatouille with a fried egg on top—and the house wine, from nearby Cebreros, tastes better after you’ve been walking in the wind.

Night-time: Bring Darkness, Not Nightlife

Street-lighting consists of four sodium lamps that switch off at midnight to save the ayuntamiento €37 a month. What you gain is darkness proper: on cloudless nights the Milky Way arches from one horizon to the other, something most Brits haven’t seen since the last power cut of childhood. Download a star-map app before arrival—phone signal drops to 3G the moment you leave the main road, and Vodafone is the only network that clings on inside the adobe walls.

There is no pub, no live music, no late-night churros van. Bring a pack of cards, a bottle of verdejo, and the expectation that bedtime will shift to 22:30 without protest. If silence makes you twitchy, record the wind beforehand and play it on loop; otherwise the absence of traffic, fridges and neighbours can feel unnerving.

Getting Here, Leaving Again

Salamanca airport, 79 km west, has exactly two Ryanair flights a week from London Stansted (Tuesdays and Saturdays, 2 hrs). Hire-car desks shut between flights; reserve in advance and refuse the “upgrade” to a 1.0 city car—you’ll need torque for the farm-track detours. Madrid-Barajas is simpler: 120 km on fast duel-carriageway, junction to junction in 75 minutes unless the fog hueca descends. There is no railway within 40 km; the daily bus from Ávila is timed for schoolchildren and useless for anyone else.

Fill the tank in Arévalo (15 km) and withdraw cash while you’re at it—Villanueva’s solitary ATM lives inside the town hall, open 09:00–14:00, and it eats foreign cards for sport. When you leave, the same rule applies: the next services are 37 km north on the A-62, direction Valladolid, where a litre of unleaded suddenly costs 12 cents more.

Worth the Detour?

If your idea of a Spanish holiday includes flamenco, paella and somebody thrusting a sangria bucket in your hand, stay on the motorway. Villanueva de Gómez offers instead a calibration of scale: how small a community can be and still function, how loud the wind sounds when 102 people pause, how far you can see when nothing rises above two storeys. Come for the wheat-light at dawn, stay long enough to notice the storks returning to the same nest chimney year after year, and leave before the silence starts feeling like bragging.