Los Villares de Soria

The road out of Soria climbs through wheat-coloured nothingness until the GPS announces, almost apologetically, that you have arrived. Los Villares de Soria is not a place you drift into by accident; the cereal steppe rolls away on every side, and the village appears as a short, stone-coloured interruption in the horizon. At 1,060 m above sea level the air is thinner than on the Duero plain, and even in June the breeze carries a reminder that nights up here can drop to single figures.

Eighty-two residents are listed on the municipal roll, though on weekdays you would be forgiven for thinking the figure optimistic. The main street, Calle Real, is barely two hundred metres long; a tractor parked outside the agricultural co-op counts as traffic. There is no chemist, no cash machine, and the single bar opens only when its owner returns from the fields. What the village does have, unexpectedly, is a restaurant that pulls diners from Madrid, Zaragoza and, increasingly, weekenders off the EasyJet flight into Valladolid. Restaurante Los Villares occupies a converted farmhouse at the far end of the street; its grey stone façade gives little away, yet every Friday night the dining room fills with people who booked weeks earlier and drove an hour for the privilege.

The tasting menu changes with the season but the cadence is Castilian: a sequence of strong, direct flavours that taste of cold winters and short springs. A first course of pochas beans—buttery, parchment-skinned, cooked in nothing more than water, olive oil and a single bay leaf—arrives with a single scarlet carabinero prawn perched on top like an exclamation mark. Lamb follows, invariably: chops from six-month-old churra milk-fed stock, grilled over vine cuttings so the fat hisses and crisps. Portions are modest; the meal can stretch to seven courses yet you leave feeling fed rather than stuffed. Vegetarians survive if they warn the kitchen in advance, otherwise every path leads back to pork or lamb. The set price hovers just under €40, house wine from Ribera del Duero included, which explains why British visitors mutter “Michelin quality at Wetherspoon cost” into their napkins.

Booking is non-negotiable. The restaurant seats thirty-six and the tasting menu is served only at weekends. Telephone Spanish is limited—if your grasp of the language stops at “una mesa para dos” ask your hotel in Soria to call. Walk-ins are turned away politely but firmly; more than one couple has driven from Bilbao only to eat ham sandwiches in the car park.

Staying the night means either the adjoining three-room hotel or the twenty-minute drive back to Soria. The rooms are clean, under-heated and agreeably cheap (about €60 with breakfast), but the walls are thin enough to hear the dishwasher finish its cycle. Most visitors treat Los Villares as a gastronomic detour rather than a base: arrive for a 14:00 table, linger over coffee, and be back in the city before the sun drops behind the meseta.

What you should not expect is a picture-postcard mountain village. There are no cobbled alleys tumbling to a river, no heraldic shields above stone doorways. Houses are low, practical, built of the same ochre limestone that litters the fields. Adobe patches show where owners have filled a hole with whatever came to hand; corrugated iron replaces missing roof tiles. The parish church, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, stands at the physical centre but keeps Spanish hours: locked unless the priest is in town. Its bell tower serves mainly as a navigation aid for hikers crossing the treeless farmland that surrounds the village.

Those walks are the other reason to come. A lattice of dirt tracks links Los Villares with the even smaller hamlets of Calatañazor and Muriel de la Torre. The gradients are gentle—this is plateau, not sierra—so an hour’s stroll at dawn will put you among wheat stubble and calcareous scrub alive with skylarks and crested larks. In September the fields turn a metallic gold and the air smells of chaff; by February the palette is reduced to brown earth and white frost. Bring water: there are no cafés along the way and shade is theoretical. A circular route south to the abandoned village of Castilviejo and back is eight kilometres, just enough to earn lunch.

Autumn also brings mushroom permits. The regional government auctions collecting rights in nearby pine plantations and the paperwork must be shown if a forest guard appears. Boletus edulis and níscalos appear after the first October rains, though success varies: some years the baskets overflow, others the same ground yields nothing but pine needles. Locals are proprietary about their spots; follow anyone carrying a wicker basket and you will be stared at with polite suspicion.

Culture, in the conventional sense, is 25 minutes away in Soria itself. The Numantino Museum has Celtiberian jewellery that predates the Romans, while the ruined cloisters of San Juan de Duero glow honey-coloured in late afternoon light. Back in Los Villares the only scheduled noise is the Friday-night disco held in the social centre during summer fiestas—one speaker, plastic chairs, children racing between tables until the small hours. Brits used to Ibiza volume may find the scene quaint; earplugs are still useful if your room faces the plaza.

Practicalities are straightforward but require planning. A car is essential: buses from Soria are labelled “escolar” and exist mainly to take secondary-school pupils home on Fridays. Taxis charge about €20 each way and drivers prefer phone bookings. Fill the tank before leaving the city; the nearest petrol pump is 18 km away in Ólvega. Cash remains king—neither the restaurant nor the hotel welcomes cards, and the only ATM is back beside the cathedral you just drove past.

Weather can pivot in an hour. Summer afternoons top 32 °C but plunge to 12 °C after midnight; pack a fleece even in August. Winter brings snow that lingers on the lanes long after the main road is clear; if rental agreements forbid snow chains reconsider a February visit. Spring and early October offer the kindest light and temperatures that stay in the teens—ideal for walking off the previous night’s lamb.

Los Villares de Soria will never feature on a list of Spain’s prettiest villages, and that is precisely its appeal. It is a working scratch of farmland with one extraordinary kitchen, a place where lunch can last three hours and the loudest sound at dusk is grain settling in a metal silo. Come for the meal, stay for the silence, and leave before the fields make you too comfortable.