Alcubilla de las Peñas

The church bell strikes noon, yet only three swifts wheel overhead. In Alcubilla de las Peñas, population sixty-odd, timekeeping feels almost ornamental. At 1,124 m on the Sorian páramo, the village sits high enough for your ears to pop on the drive up, yet low enough for the Atlantic weather to bruise the sky charcoal in minutes. What you notice first is the hush: not the creepy sort, but the acoustic blankness that follows snowfall. Even in May, when the stone houses throw heat back at you, the place sounds muffled, as if the wind has forgotten its lines.

Stone, Wind and Empty Rooms

Everything here is built from what hurts. Granite boulders, flint-sharp, form the field walls; adobe bricks, the colour of digestive biscuits, plug the gaps. Roof tiles curl like stale toast. Walk the single main street—Calle Real, though nothing royal passes—and you’ll count more ruined houses than lived-in ones. Some have tree saplings sprouting from upstairs bedrooms. Others have been stitched up with breeze blocks and bright blue PVC windows, the renovation equivalent of wearing trainers with a morning suit. The overall effect is neither tragic nor quaint; it is simply what happens when a place stops being profitable.

The parish church of San Pedro keeps its doors unlocked. Inside, the air smells of candle smoke and damp stone. There is no baroque altar, no frescoed dome, just a single nave whitewashed every decade whether it needs it or not. On the wall, a laminated sheet lists the dead from both civil wars—1936-39 and the 1808-14 Peninsular campaign—proof that even here, history doubled back for a second helping.

Walking the Dry Beauty

Leave the last electricity pole behind and the land opens like a grey-green ledger. Sheep tracks braid the clay; stone beehive huts, once shelters for shepherds, now store fencing wire and feed sacks. Within ten minutes the village shrinks to a Lego cluster on the ridge. Head south and you hit the Raso de la Nava, a treeless plateau where the only vertical features are the volcanic teeth that give the place its suffix—“de las Peñas”. The rocks are scored with Victorian-era initials and, if you look closely, fossilised oyster shells from when this desert was seabed.

There are no signed trails, simply the old drove roads that took cattle to winter pastures in the Ebro valley. A sensible circuit is to follow the track past the abandoned hamlet of Los Bodegones (cellars dug into the tuff, roofs long collapsed) then drop into the shallow Barranco del Cuco where a spring still drips, even in August. Allow two hours, carry a litre of water per person, and don’t trust the stone cairns—goat herders build them for fun. Mobile reception vanishes after the first ridge; download the IGN 1:25,000 map beforehand or take a paper copy like the locals do.

Night Falls Hard

At dusk the temperature plummets fourteen degrees in as many minutes. Suddenly the stone houses make sense: walls a metre thick, windows the size of postboxes, every chimney trailing the smell of oak smoke. There is no street lighting; starlight has to do. On clear nights the Milky Way spills across the sky like spilled sugar, bright enough to cast shadows. Bring a tripod and you can photograph Orion rising between rooflines without light pollution muddying the shot. The village’s altitude and continental dryness mean that even British visitors used to Scottish drizzle can pick out the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye.

Where to Sleep, Eat and Fill Up

Alcubilla itself offers no hotels, no casas rurales, not even a bar. The nearest beds are 12 km away in the slightly larger village of Covaleda, where Hotel Radona (three-star, €55 a double in low season) has underfloor heating and a restaurant serving roast suckling lamb at €22 a portion. Fill the petrol tank in Soria before you leave—the last fuel pump on the N-110 closes at 20:00 and refuses cards on Sundays. If you want supplies, the Covaleda Spar opens 09:00-14:00, stocks local cheese made with raw sheep’s milk and bottles of Ribera del Duero for under ten euros. Picnic tables beside the church fountain make a handy lunch stop; the water is potable, though it carries enough iron to stain your bottle orange.

When the Calendar Flickers to Life

For forty-eight hours each August the village doubles in size. Former residents drive up from Madrid, Valencia, even Basel, towing wheeled cool boxes and grandchildren who speak Swiss German. The fiesta begins with a mass sung by a priest trucked in from Arcos de Jalón, followed by a communal paella cooked in a pan two metres wide. After dark a sound system appears from nowhere, belting out 1990s Eurodance until the mayor—who is also the school bus driver—pulls the plug at 03:00. By Tuesday lunchtime the place is silent again, empty crisp packets scuttling across the plaza like urban tumbleweed. If you dislike organised fun, avoid the third weekend of August. If you want to see how a village re-inflates itself with memory, book early in Covaleda.

Getting Here, Getting Out

From London, fly to Madrid, then take the hourly ALSA coach to Soria (2 h 15 m, €18). Hire a car at the station—Enterprise and Europcar both allow one-way drop to Zaragoza if you’re continuing east. The CL-114 south from Soria is well paved but narrows to single track for the final 8 km; passing places are cut into the rock, so don’t day-dream. In winter the road is gritted after snow, yet drifting can still block it overnight; carry blankets and a full phone charge. Summer drivers face the opposite hazard: the asphalt softens and motorbikes have been known to skid on melted tar. Average annual rainfall is 420 mm, less than East Anglia, but when it arrives the clay turns to grease and even tractors slide sideways.

Parting Shot

Alcubilla de las Peñas will not change your life. It offers no epiphanies, no Instagram hotspots, barely a coffee. What it does provide is a calibration point: a place where you can measure how much noise, light and company you actually need. Stand on the ridge at sunset, wind whipping your jacket like a flag, and the twenty-first century feels negotiable rather than inevitable. Just remember to be gone before nightfall unless you’ve booked that room down the road—there are no taxis, and the shepherd who sometimes gives lifts frowns on strangers after 22:00.