Pozos de Hinojo

The thermometer drops six degrees between Salamanca and Pozos de Hinojo. At 739 metres above sea level, this granite hamlet sits high enough for the air to carry a faint scent of wild fennel—the plant that gave the village its name and still pushes through cracked walls along the single main street. Forty-eight residents remain. Their tractors leave early, returning with straw bales that tower like improvised monuments beside stone houses built when Britain still ran on coal.

Granite, Gates and the Sound of Tractors

Everything here is grey until it isn't. The church, the low cottages, the slabs underfoot: all hewn from local granite that turns silver in morning light. Then someone opens a timber gate—three metres high, black with age—and a rectangle of scarlet poppies or sun-yellow courgette flowers flashes from an interior patio. The doors aren't for show; they seal corrals where chickens keep the dust moving and dogs sleep through the noon bell. Close them quickly or expect a lecture from whichever neighbour has the day's vigilante shift from her kitchen window.

There is no centre to speak of, merely a slight widening where the road hesitates before continuing towards Vitigudino, eight kilometres west. A bench, a litter bin and the village's only streetlamp with a functioning bulb constitute the public realm. Visitors expecting a plaza and tiled fountain will be disappointed; those who pack stout shoes and a sense of temporal slippage will not.

Walking the entire settlement takes twelve minutes at dawdle speed. The northern edge stops abruptly at a threshing floor still ringed by low walls where wheat was once trodden by oxen. Beyond it, dehesa rolls out—oak pasture that looks wild until you notice the neat slashes where pigs have rooted for acorns. This is working landscape, not backdrop. Farmers here don't distinguish between scenery and salary.

What Passes for Sights

The parish church of San Miguel fits its congregation exactly: twenty pews, no side chapels, a single nave cool even when the surrounding granite radiates July heat. The priest arrives from Villarino de los Aires every other Sunday; on off-weeks the building stays locked. Peer through the iron grille and you'll see a modest baroque retablo whose gilding was restored in 1998 after a donation from the one emigrant who made money in Switzerland restoring parquet floors. No tickets, no audio guides, just the smell of beeswax and stone damp.

More revealing are the three communal washhouses fed by a spring that never dries. Women still scrub carrots here when household taps sputter in late summer. The largest trough carries a carved date: 1923, the year the village peaked at 312 souls. Stand still and you can hear water echoing exactly as it did when British coal miners were striking back home.

Photographers hunt out the bread-oven house on Calle de Arriba—its mouth like a black laugh in the wall—yet the better subject is the working apiary behind number fourteen. The owner, Julián, will lift a lid so you can hear the communal hum of Iberian dark bees. He sells jars for six euros each, labels handwritten, corks cut from last year's wine stoppers. There is no shop; knock and hope he's in.

Tracks that Leave the Map

Three footpaths radiate from the upper threshing floor. The widest, marked by two parallel ruts, was the old drove road linking Salamanca with Portugal. Shepherds still move 800-head flocks along it each October; the animals overnight in Pozos' communal corral, turning the lane to a churned ribbon smelling of lanolin and dust. Timing your walk to coincide requires luck and a willingness to ask in the bar of neighbouring Villavieja—there is no tourist office, digital or otherwise.

A slimmer track climbs south-east towards the Sierra de Francia, gaining 400 metres in five kilometres. The reward is a vantage over the village that resembles a crushed grey toy, its orange-tiled roofs the only colour in a khaki world. Griffon vultures ride thermals above; bring binoculars and expect company only from a local goatherd who may offer a slug of orujo from his aluminium flask. Accept—it cuts the wind.

Winter alters the deal. At 739 metres, snow can arrive overnight, drifting against granite walls and erasing paths. The road from Vitigudino is cleared eventually, but "eventually" operates on Castilian time. January visits require a car with decent ground clearance and a boot packed with blankets, just in case the plough decides tomorrow is soon enough.

Eating (Elsewhere) and Sleeping (Nowhere)

Pozos itself has no bar, no restaurant, no bakery. The nearest coffee arrives in Villavieja, four kilometres west, where Bar Cristina opens at seven for farmers and serves a serviceable tortilla del día for €4.50. Lunch options concentrate in Vitigudino: Mesón La Fragua does judiones—buttery white beans the size of conkers—stewed with pork cheek, €12 a portion, closed Tuesdays.

Accommodation requires similar lateral thinking. The village's last rental cottage closed when the British owner died in 2019; her heirs are still "sorting papeleos". Instead, book into the casa rural in Villarino de los Aires, fifteen minutes by car. Rooms overlook the Duero reservoir; mornings bring mist that lifts like a theatre curtain on hills ribbed with olive terraces. Expect to pay €70 for a double, breakfast extra if you want it—Spaniards assume you had toast at home.

When the Village Remembers Itself

August's fiesta patronal triples the population. Emigrants return from Madrid, Barcelona, even Swindon, pitching nylon tents between pear trees. The single street becomes an impromptu dance floor; someone rigs speakers to a tractor battery and teenage cousins who haven't met since last year shuffle to reggaeton beside grandparents who prefer pasodobles. A ram is raffled, slaughtered, roasted in a pit dug behind the church. If that sounds medieval, arrive earlier and you'll catch the WhatsApp group arguments over whose turn it is to provide firewood.

The day after, silence reasserts itself with almost comic speed. Tents collapse, cars loaded, goodbyes shouted before the thermometer climbs towards thirty-five degrees. By noon the village is again forty-eight souls and a scatter of cats. Granite walls retain the smell of roast meat and woodsmoke for a week; then fennel takes over, sharp and medicinal, reminding everyone why the place is named what it is.

How to Get There, and Why You Might Bother

Salamanca's bus station dispatches a single service to Vitigudino at 14:30 daily; from there a taxi covers the remaining eight kilometres for €18. Car hire is saner: take the A-62 south-west, exit at 264 towards Ledesma, then follow the SA-320 through mile-upon-mile of wheat. The final turn-off is unsigned except for a hand-painted board advertising honey; that arrow points down a lane narrow enough to make passing a combine harvester an exercise in respiratory control.

Come if you want to calibrate your internal clock to a slower pendulum. Don't come for souvenirs—no one sells them—or for Wi-Fi; the signal wheezes like an asthmatic cat. Bring cash, a phrasebook, and the understanding that you are background, not audience. The village will continue after you leave, tractors departing at dawn, fennel seeding itself in cracks no tourist notices. That continuity is the real altitude sickness: a sudden awareness that some places measure time in centuries, not seasons.