Muriel de la Fuente

The morning frost lingers until eleven o'clock even in late April, and the stone houses exhale thin streams of wood-smoke that drift across the single-track road. At this altitude—1,050 m above sea level—Muriel de la Fuente's spring water emerges so cold that locals fill bottles straight from the spout, convinced it saves on fridge electricity. Fifty-five residents are listed on the municipal register, though on weekdays you might count fewer; the school closed in 1998 and the last grocery shop followed a decade later.

Stone, Smoke and Silence

The village architecture is stubbornly practical: schist walls 60 cm thick, timber balconies painted the colour of ox-blood, roofs weighted with hand-made Arab tiles that have cracked under fifty winters of snow. Nothing is “restored” in the boutique sense; when a roof leaks, someone climbs up and retiles it. House numbers stop at 42, and several of those are husks—doors nailed shut, windows blind with boards, the limestone chimney-stacks crumbling like stale cheese. Yet the settlement feels alive rather than museum-like: a tractor parked half in the street, washing pegged out despite the altitude, the smell of resin drifting from a recently felled pine.

Walk downhill past the stone trough where women once beat laundry and you reach the 17th-century church, its bell tower slightly off-plumb after an earthquake no one can date exactly. The door is usually unlocked; inside, the air smells of candle wax and damp stone. A single bulb hangs from the choir ceiling, the switch operated by a pull-cord that slaps against the wall like an impatient finger. There are no explanatory panels, no donation box shaped like a heart—just a hand-painted notice listing the August fiesta mass times.

Forests that Pay the Bills

Beyond the last barn the tarmac gives out and the pine plantations begin, row upon row of Pinus sylvestris marching over the ridge. These woods have never been wilderness: they were first planted in the 1940s to stop erosion and provide pit-props for the coal mines of León. Today the timber trucks still come, though now the logs are bound for pulp mills near Valladolid. On still days you can hear the distant whine of a chainsaw by 7 a.m.; by dusk the smell of fresh sap is strong enough to sting the eyes.

For walkers the network of forest tracks is both gift and frustration. Gift, because you can roam for hours without meeting another soul; frustration, because the signposts are aimed at tractors, not tourists. A sensible loop starts at the fuente de la Teja, 500 m west of the village, and follows the GR-86 long-distance path south-east through the valley of the Razón stream. The gradient is gentle, but the path crosses three seasonal fords that may be knee-deep after rain. Allow two and a half hours back to the village, and carry water—there are no bars, no fountains, no phone signal once you drop behind the ridge.

Seasonal Arithmetic

Winter arrives suddenly. The first snow can fall in mid-October and by December the road from Covaleda is routinely closed after 8 p.m. when drifts erase the edges. Residents park at the top of the hill and sled provisions down on plastic sheeting. Heating is almost exclusively wood-burning; a full carga—one cubic metre of split pine—costs around €90 delivered and lasts a careful household six weeks. Visitors booking the self-catering house La Fuentona (three bedrooms, sleeps five, €110 per night minimum two nights) are warned to arrive before dark and to bring chains even in March.

Summer, by contrast, is a brief, bright explosion. Daytime temperatures hover in the mid-twenties, nights drop to 12 °C, and the stone houses act like natural fridges. Swallows return to the eaves, the forest fills with nightjars, and the village population may triple as grandchildren arrive from Madrid. August 15 brings the fiesta patronal: a mass at noon, a communal paella cooked in a pan two metres wide, and a disco that thumps until 5 a.m.—the only night of the year when the silence is legally suspended.

What Passes for Gastronomy

There is no restaurant, no café, no tapas bar. If you want to eat out you drive 18 km to Covaleda, where Casa Paco serves lechazo—milk-fed lamb roasted in a wood oven—at €24 per quarter kilo. What Muriel does offer is ingredients. Knock on the door of the house with the blue gate and Doña Victoria sells queso de camella, a tangy cheese made from the milk of her two camels (yes, camels; they cope better than cows on the poor mountain pasture). A kilo costs €18, wrapped in grease-proof paper and a page from last week’s ABC. During mushroom season locals set up an honesty table by the church: níscalos at €12 the kilo, the price scrawled on a paper plate. Bring small notes; no one has change for a fifty.

Breakfast options are therefore DIY. The nearest supermarket is a 25-minute drive in Soria, so stock up before you arrive. Baker’s vans visit on Tuesday and Friday at about 10 a.m.; listen for the horn and be prepared to queue behind three grandmothers who still bargain in peseta equivalents.

Getting There, Getting Stuck, Getting Out

There is no railway for 100 km. From the UK the least painful route is a flight to Madrid, then the Alsa coach to Soria (2 h 15 m, €22), followed by a pre-booked taxi (€45, Monday–Saturday only). Car hire is simpler: take the A-1 north from Madrid, turn off at km 115, and climb the SO-920 for 43 km of switchbacks. The asphalt is decent but meeting a timber lorry on a hairpin requires nerves and a reversing gene.

Phone coverage is patchy—Vodafone works on the church steps, O2 demands you stand on the picnic table. Wi-Fi in the village is theoretical; the council installed a municipal router inside the ayuntamiento, but the password changes every month and nobody can remember the current one. Embrace the disconnection; download maps before you leave.

The Arithmetic of Departure

Stay three days and you will have walked every track, named every dog, and discovered that the church bell strikes thirteen at 7 p.m. because the mechanism slips. Stay a week and you may start measuring time by the smoke rising from chimneys, or catch yourself nodding to the passing 4×4 even when you cannot see the driver through the tinted glass. Leave before you begin calculating how many cords of wood you would need for a winter, or how long it takes for a village to become simply a scattering of second homes. Muriel de la Fuente does not beg you to linger; it merely notes your departure with the same mild interest it showed on your arrival, then returns to the slow business of keeping the cold out and the water running.