Perosillo

The only traffic jam in Perosillo happens at dusk when a shepherd and his thirty-odd merino sheep shuffle down the single paved street to overnight pens behind stone houses. Stand still and you’ll hear resin crackling on nearby pines, the sound carrying farther than any engine. This is Segovia’s Tierra de Pinares at 830 m, a high plateau where the horizon is drawn with forest, not monuments, and the village head-count (twenty in winter, perhaps double that when summer returnees fire up ancestral fireplaces) fits comfortably inside a London double-decker.

A Settlement That Weathered Spain’s Rural Drain

Adobe walls the colour of wheat stubble shoulder up to timber-beam houses whose upper floors once stored pine resin bales. The raw material fed a now-vanished distillery in the next valley; today the resin scent still drifts from sun-warmed bark, a reminder that the local economy was built on what oozes slowly from trees. There is no interpretive centre, no gift shop selling pine-scented candles, just the smell itself, free and impossible to bottle.

Walk the perimeter in fifteen minutes: a compact grid of earth-toned dwellings, a locked 18th-century church (the key lives with Don Ernesto, identifiable by his khaki flat cap), and a concrete trough where potable water gushes day and night. The trough isn’t heritage-listed; it’s simply where neighbours fill jerry-cans when the village pump plays up. Utility, not nostalgia, keeps it running.

Outsiders sometimes misread the silence as abandonment. Boards bar a couple of windows, yes, but most houses show signs of stealthy renewal: new roof tiles, silicone-sealed doors, German-registered cars under tarpaulins. Owners are Madrid teachers, Valladolid nurses, a Basque carpenter who discovered he could buy a whole cottage here for the price of a San Sebastián parking space. They arrive on Fridays, switch on solar batteries installed during the previous visit, and vanish Sunday night, leaving lavender pots on sills to fend for themselves.

Forest Arithmetic: How Far You Can Walk Without Seeing Anyone

Leave the last electricity pole behind and footpaths become sandy wheel-ruts between maritime pines planted in ruler-straight ranks. After five minutes the village is a smudge of terracotta; after fifteen the only human traces are boot prints overlapping wild-boar trotters. Keep bearing north-east and you’ll hit the abandoned resin workers’ hut at Cañada Honda—four walls, no roof, ideal for a wind-blown picnic. Beyond that, the track unravels for another 18 km until it bumps into the Eresma river gorge. Maps label it a forest road; locals call it “el cruce de nadie” — nobody’s crossroads.

Summer walking demands early starts. By 11 a.m. the sun has turned the pine carpet into a reflecting plate and shade is theoretical. Carry two litres of water per person; streams marked on Ordnance-Survey-style Spanish maps dried up in the 1997 drought and never returned. Spring and autumn are kinder: mushrooms push through needles after October rain, and the air smells of damp bark and distant wood smoke. Winter brings snow pockets that linger in hollows, but the plateau road is usually cleared within 24 hours—vital, because the weekly bakery van refuses to chain its tyres.

Eating Locally When There Isn’t a Local

Perosillo itself has no bar, no shop, no Sunday pop-up craft market. Instead, hospitality is transactional in the original sense: knock on the right door and someone’s aunt will sell you a frozen suckling lamb she raised on village scraps. Price: €9 a kilo, payable in exact cash because change means a 26-km round trip to the nearest ATM in Carbonero el Mayor.

For more conventional dining, drive ten minutes to Villacastín. Mesón El Cazador does a three-course menú del día for €14 including half a bottle of mediocre Rioja; the roast lamb arrives with wafer-crisp skin and a cautionary puddle of rendered fat that could restart a Peugeot. Vegetarians get scrambled eggs with wild asparagus, a dish that sounds incidental until you discover the eggs were laid that morning by hens watching traffic from the restaurant porch.

Buy picnic supplies in Sepúlveda, 25 km north. Quesería de Tierra de Pinares stocks raw-milk sheep cheese aged in pine bark collars, a flavour that carries the same resinous note you noticed on the forest walk. Pair it with a bottle of zarzaparrilla, a local sarsaparilla soft drink that tastes like someone simmered dandelion and burdock with extra liquorice. British palates raised on Ben Shaws will find it oddly familiar.

Getting Here, Staying Here, Leaving Here

Madrid-Barajas is 70 minutes south-west on the A-1 toll motorway; Valladolid airport is closer but flight choice is thinner. Car hire is non-negotiable—there is no railway within 40 km and the daily bus from Segovia to Villacastín times its arrival to ensure you miss every connection. Roads are well-surfaced until the final 4 km, where tarmac gives way to graded gravel wide enough for one vehicle and a philosophical conversation about reversing.

Accommodation is scattered farmhouses restored as weekend retreats. Expect nightly rates around €90 for two bedrooms, wood-burning stove, and a shower that delivers either scalding or glacial water depending on solar-tank mood. One property, La Casa del Montero, includes a telescope; the altitude and negligible light pollution mean Andromeda shows up without the usual London orange halo. Book through specialist rural platforms—Airbnb lists the village, but owners often waive service fees if contacted directly and your Spanish stretches to negotiating bin-collection days.

Check-out policy is relaxed: hand keys to whichever neighbour fed the chickens. They may offer a parting gift—perhaps a fistful of saffron-dusted pine nuts harvested from the forest you walked yesterday. Accept. It’s the closest thing Perosillo has to a souvenir shop, and customs back home won’t bat an eyelid.

The plateau will still be there next year, the pines a fraction taller, the village population possibly one fewer. Visit sooner rather than later if you want to hear resin crackle before someone decides the silence is better monetised elsewhere.