Santa Colomba de Curueño

The morning mist lifts off the Curueño at its own pace, revealing a valley where mobile phones lose signal long before they lose battery. At 940 metres above sea level, Santa Colomba de Curueño doesn't so much welcome visitors as allow them to witness a place that got on perfectly well without Instagram.

This scattering of stone hamlets, 45 minutes' drive north of León, sits where the Cantabrian foothills shrug off the Castilian plain. The river that gives the municipality its name threads through meadows still cut for hay in late June, when the air carries the scent of dried grass and woodsmoke from kitchens firing up for cocido. It's the sort of landscape that makes you understand why Spanish painters reached for ochre and burnt umber – nothing else would be honest.

Stone, Water and the Sound of No Traffic

The village proper – if a place of 490 souls can be called proper – clusters around a 12th-century church whose bell still marks the hours. The houses are low, built from local limestone that turns honey-coloured in evening light. Wooden balconies, some sagging with the weight of centuries, hold geraniums that survive the winter thanks to microclimates created by the walls themselves. There's no centre to speak of, just a gradual thickening of buildings until you realise you've passed what passes for the main square.

Walk twenty minutes in any direction and you're in one of the smaller settlements that fall under the municipality's umbrella. Each has its own threshing floor, its own bread oven, its own story of why people stayed when so many left for Madrid or Manchester during the 1960s. The abandoned houses haven't been prettified – they're simply empty, their roofs gradually collapsing under the weight of snow that can lie for weeks in January.

The river provides the only real soundtrack. No cafés spill music onto streets; no lorries thunder through because there's nowhere to thunder to. What you hear instead is water over stone, the clack of a shepherd's staff, occasionally the low of cattle being moved between pastures. It's the kind of quiet that makes city dwellers nervous for the first day, then addicted by the third.

When the Map Shows More Footpaths Than Roads

OS-style mapping hasn't really reached here, but the local tourist office – open Tuesday and Thursday mornings, sometimes – will lend you photocopied sheets showing routes that start from your doorstep. The most straightforward follows the Curueño upstream through a gorge where griffon vultures nest on limestone cliffs. It's three hours to the head of the valley and back, with 400 metres of ascent that feels gentle because you're gaining height with every bend.

More ambitious walkers can link up with the PR-LE-31, a day-long circuit that climbs to Correcillas (1,600m) before dropping through beech woods where wild boar root for chestnuts. The path isn't waymarked in the British sense – look for stone cairns and the occasional splash of yellow paint that might date from the last municipal election. GPS helps, but following the contour lines usually works.

Mountain bikers find gravel tracks that serve the high pastures, though you'll carry the bike over cattle grids and through gates whose latches have rusted into abstract art. The reward is 15-kilometre descents where you meet more goats than people, on trails that turn to soup after October rains.

What Passes for Gastronomy When Nobody's Watching

There isn't a restaurant. What there is, if you book two days ahead, is Manuela's dining room at the Hospederia on the main – only – street. She cooks what her husband catches or shoots, supplemented by vegetables from a plot that stretches behind the house. Expect trout from the river in May, wild boar stew when the hunting season opens, and throughout the year a mountain soup thick with chickpeas and local morcilla that bears no relation to the supermarket version.

Breakfast brings cheese made three kilometres away, so young it squeaks between teeth, served with bread baked in a wood oven that also heats the water. Coffee comes in bowls because that's what they've always used. The bill for three courses with wine rarely tops €18, though you'll need cash – the card machine "works when it feels like it".

For self-caterers, León's supermarkets are 50 minutes away. Local shops stock tinned tuna, UHT milk and not much else. The Saturday market in Boñar, 20 minutes down-valley, sells produce grown within sight of the stalls: potatoes that still taste of earth, apples whose skins crack with freshness, eggs requiring a quick wash because they arrive complete with feathers.

Seasons That Don't Mess About

April brings almond blossom and the first real warmth, though nights stay cold enough that central heating fires up automatically. May is perfect – wildflowers in the meadows, riverside paths dry underfoot, daylight lasting until nearly ten. June turns serious: temperatures hit 28°C by midday, sending walkers out at dawn and siesta-ing through the afternoon heat.

July and August are for mad dogs and Englishmen. The village empties as locals decamp to coastal family; those who remain shut shutters against sun that feels personal. Autumn, though, arrives early at this altitude. By mid-September the beeches are turning, mornings smell of fungus and damp earth, and the first frost can hit before October's out.

Winter doesn't knock – it kicks the door down. Snow arrives any time from November, and when it comes properly the road from Boñar becomes a toboggan run. Chains aren't advisory, they're survival. Temperatures drop to -12°C, pipes freeze, and the generator that serves the upper barrio fails with metronomic regularity. Beautiful? Undeniably. Comfortable? Only if you regard chopping wood as a hobby.

Getting Here, Getting Away

The practical bit nobody mentions: Santa Colomba de Curueño is essentially inaccessible without a car. ALSA buses serve Boñar twice daily from León, but that's still 18 kilometres of mountain road to negotiate. Car hire from León airport – itself a 2-hour connection from Madrid – costs around €35 daily for the smallest thing that'll handle these gradients.

Driving from Santander takes three hours via the A-67 and N-621, passing through landscapes that convinced you to visit Spain in the first place. Fill the tank in León; petrol stations thin out dramatically afterwards. Phone coverage dies completely for the last 20 minutes, so screenshot your directions while you've still got signal.

Leave time for the journey. These roads were built for ox-carts, not sat-nav schedules. You'll meet tractors, herds of sheep, locals who regard 30 km/h as reckless. Wave when they lift a finger from the steering wheel – it's how they recognise strangers who might understand the place.

Some visitors stay a night, tick the box, move on to somewhere with tapas trails and souvenir shops. Others find themselves extending, then extending again, until they're on first-name terms with the baker who only bakes Tuesdays and the shepherd whose dogs recognise their hire car. The village doesn't care either way. It has fields to tend, wood to stack, another winter to prepare for. The river keeps writing its slow story across the valley, and Santa Colomba de Curueño keeps living by chapters that have nothing to do with tourism seasons.