Boceguillas

The tractors start at seven. By half past, the village hums with diesel and the clatter of metal shutters going up. In Boceguillas, this passes for a dawn chorus—no gulls, no waves, just the sound of people getting on with a working day 957 metres above sea level.

Stand on the edge of town and the plateau rolls away in every direction, a chessboard of cereal fields interrupted only by the occasional holm oak. The Sierra de Guadarrama hovers on the western horizon like a faint bruise; pretty only if you like your scenery big, dry and honest. Summer light here has the subtlety of a blow-torch—photographers should pack a polarising filter and a very early alarm clock.

A village that forgot to pose

Boceguillas will never make the cover of a glossy Spain supplement. The high street is a mix of rendered façades, 1980s brick and the odd timber balcony sagging with age. A single set of traffic lights winks at a junction where the N-110 cuts through like a ruler across wheat stubble. Stop and you’ll notice the pavements are wide enough for two abreast—handy, because everyone seems to know everyone and conversations stretch.

The fifteenth-century church squats at the top of a modest rise; its tower looks sturdy rather than elegant. Inside, the nave is cool, patched and repatched after centuries of subsidence and small-town budgets. Ask for the key in Bar RYA opposite: if the owner’s cousin is around, you’ll get a five-minute tour and a story about the time the bell cracked in a 1930s storm. Donations go on a new roof, not a gift shop.

Wander two streets back from the main road and the soundtrack changes. A dog barks, a generator throbs, somewhere a radio gives a tinny rendition of a Madrid chat show. Front doors stand open; through one you might glimpse a parlour with plastic-covered sofas and a wall-mounted bull’s head. No-one offers souvenirs because no-one expects you to buy anything.

Walking without way-markers

The best map is still the one the agricultural agent staples to the notice board outside the town hall. It shows farm tracks rather than footpaths, but that’s the point: you’re walking on working landscape. Follow the dust stripe north-east and you’ll reach the Cañada Real Soriana, the old drove road that once funnelled merino sheep to winter pastures. These days it’s more tyre-track than trail, yet the width—wide enough for five hundred head—still feels ceremonial.

Circular routes link Boceguillas to its neighbours at steady, calf-stretching intervals: Valdevacas de Montejo at 6 km, Ayllón at 12 km. Gradient is gentle but cumulative; by late June the cereal is knee-high and the earth baked into ridges that can turn an ankle. Take water—there are no cafés between villages and the only shade is what you carry on your head.

Cyclists on gravel bikes treat the web of farm lanes as a rolling playground. The wind is the invisible climb: when it blows from the south you can pedal the flats in top gear and still feel heroic; when it switches, even a downhill feels like penance.

Food that tastes of the province

Segovia’s culinary calling card is lechazo—milk-fed lamb roasted in a wood-fired oven until the skin crackles like thin toffee. In Boceguillas the dish appears on Saturday lunch menus at Restaurante Área, an unassuming brick pavilion by the petrol station on the A-1 roundabout. Locals dismiss it as “just the service station”, yet the chef sources his meat from a farm 15 km away and the price—around €22 for a quarter portion—undercuts anything in the capital.

Mid-week, choices shrink. Bar RYA does a respectable tortilla thick enough to tile a roof and offers English menus without being asked. The bakery, Panadería M. Sanz, sells a baguette that shatters into proper shards; buy one before 11 a.m. and you’ll queue behind farmers still dusted with chaff. If you’re self-catering, stock up before siesta shutters fall at 2 p.m.; shops reopen at 5, but bread is long gone.

When to come, how to leave

Public transport exists in theory: two buses a day trundle in from Segovia, the last leaving at six. Miss it and a taxi is €60—more than the car hire for 24 hours. Madrid-Barajas is 90 minutes down the A-1 if the traffic behaves; collect your rental on arrival and the plateau is yours.

May and mid-September gift green wheat, mild afternoons and night-time temperatures that actually encourage a jumper. July and August roast; thermometers touch 35 °C by noon and the village empties into shuttered houses until seven. August fiestas (15th–17th, check yearly) bring temporary bars and a foam machine in the square—fun if you fancy a very local version of Ibiza, otherwise book elsewhere.

Winter is sharp. Blue skies continue but the wind carries ice; snow proper is rare, yet the road to Segovia can glaze over at dawn. If you’re renting, ask for chains—most fleet cars sit on summer tyres all year.

The honest verdict

Boceguillas supplies something the postcard villages have lost: the sensation of arriving after breakfast and still being a curiosity by dinner. You won’t leave with armfuls of ceramics or a camera roll of palaces; instead you’ll remember the smell of hot stone at midday, the way the horizon blurs when the cereal fields ripple, and a bar owner who insists on topping up your wine because “you’ve come a long way, haven’t you?”

Come prepared—car, cash, Spanish pleasantries—and the village repays with unfiltered Castilian daylight and the space to hear yourself think. Just don’t tell them you read it here; they’d rather get on with harvest.