Navares de Enmedio

The sheep bells have the final word in Navares de Enmedio. Long after the last diesel hatchback rattles out of the village, the only punctuation to the night is the slow clank of neck-bells drifting across the plateau. At 1,050 m above sea level the air is thin enough to carry sound for miles, so every cough from a corral and every church-door creak travels like a telegram across the adobe walls.

Adobe, straw and the smell of rain on stone

Start at the plaza, the only patch of level ground the builders could be bothered with. The parish church squats here like a referee, its tower barely taller than the grain elevator in somebody’s back garden. The walls are river stone up to the height of a man, then sun-baked brick above – a practical ledger of whatever came cheap in the 17th century. Step inside and the temperature drops ten degrees; the nave smells of candle wax and the straw chairs still used for Sunday mass. Nothing is labelled, yet everything speaks: the confessional with its varnish worn off where elbows have rested three centuries, the bell rope frayed to a ponytail.

From the church door three streets fan out, none longer than a cricket pitch. Houses are the colour of dry biscuits, their timber frames bulging like old sofas. Most still have the original wooden-grille windows, small enough to make you stoop. Peek through and you’ll see the same layout repeated: stone-flagged corridor, single bulb dangling, a calendar from 2018 because the picture is nicer than this year’s. Gates are built for donkeys, not SUVs, so modern cars sit apologetically in the threshing circles at the edge of the village, circled by chickens that have never seen a battery.

Walking the sheet-metal sea

Leave the last house behind and the plateau opens like a loose ledger. The caminos are merely two ruts pressed into wheat stubble; their only marking is the occasional sheet-metal silhouette of a bull – advertising for a sherry brand that no longer exports to Britain. Walk south-east for twenty minutes and you hit the cement track that links Navares de Enmedio with its siblings, Navares de las Cuevas and Navares de Ayuso. The names are not romantic affectation: they mark the order in which medieval shepherds sorted their summer pastures.

Spring brings the easiest miles. Green wheat hisses in the wind, poppies flare like brake lights, and larks ascend until they’re punctuation marks in the sky. By July the same fields have turned aluminium-coloured; the only shade is offered by holm oaks twisted into question marks. Autumn is the photographers’ window – the stubble glows copper, the sky keeps a hard Prussian-blue dome, and the sun sits low enough to model every furrow. Winter is honest: steel sky, steel soil, and a wind that scours the lipstick off your face. Bring a buff and waterproof boots; the mud here has a clay content that will add half a stone to each foot.

Reservoirs, roast lamb and the maths of silence

Food choices inside the village are simple: there aren’t any. The last bar closed when the owner retired in 2019. Instead, plan a six-kilometre drive to Carbonero el Mayor where Mesón de la Villa will serve you lechazo – milk-fed lamb roasted in a wood-fired brick oven until the skin forms a brittle parchment. A quarter-kilo portion costs €18 and arrives with only a hunk of white bread and a lemon wedge; anything greener would feel exhibitionist. Vegetarians can order judiones (butter beans stewed with paprika and saffron), but expect a raised eyebrow as if you’ve asked for custard on steak.

Evenings follow reservoir time. The Embalse de Linares is five minutes north; no boats for hire, just a slipway used by local lads who’ve patched together a fibreglass dinghy. They fish for carp and barbel, mostly to justify bringing a cool-box of beer. British anglers will recognise the method: ledger rig, sweet-corn hook-bait, patience measured in tinnies. Swimming is officially discouraged because the water feeds Segovia’s taps, yet on August nights teenagers shriek off the dam wall until the Guardia Civil turn up, yawn, and tell them to keep the noise down.

Where to sleep and how not to get stuck

Accommodation is self-catering or nothing. Airbnb lists a dozen cottages, nearly all converted by families who left for Madrid in the 1980s and have now discovered the rental market. Expect stone floors, ceiling beams you’ll bang your head on, and a pool that will be too cold after 15 September. Prices swing from £75 a night for a two-bedroom house with a pellet burner to £120 for one that throws in underfloor heating and a Nespresso machine. Mobile signal indoors is theoretical; WhatsApp works if you stand by the upstairs window facing the cement water tower. Download maps before you set off; the lanes are a labyrinth of identical junctions and the sat-nav likes to deposit you in somebody’s barn.

Driving is straightforward if you remember one rule: never trust the tarmac. The last twenty kilometres peel off the N-603 at Villacastín onto the SG-232, a road maintained in the same spirit as a dry-stone wall – serviceable, but don’t lean on it too hard. Frost shards appear in November and can linger until ten in the morning; if you’re on summer tyres you’ll skate like a curling stone. A hire-car from Madrid-Barajas costs around £110 for four days with basic insurance; fill the tank at the A-6 services because pumps in the Segovian highlands close for siesta and sometimes for the whole weekend.

When to come and when to leave

Arrive in late April for the wheat-green glow and the first bee-eaters. Stay three nights maximum; the village’s circumference can be walked before the kettle boils. Come back in October if you want the plateau to yourself – British half-term doesn’t register here, and the grain stubble crackles underfoot like broken biscuits. August is family-fiesta season: the population quadruples, someone wires a sound system to the church tower, and the plaza hosts an open-air dinner that starts at 23:00 with bottomless red wine poured from plastic jerry-cans. It’s fun for an hour, then you remember you’re a guest in someone else’s reunion.

Leave before you stop noticing the bells. Navares de Enmedio offers no postcard moment, no single sight to tick off. What it does give is a calibration service: a place where distance is measured in echoing bleats and time in the time it takes for rain to dry on adobe. Drive away and the plateau shrinks in the mirror until only the wind remains, keeping the clocks slow for whoever arrives next.