Cubillos

The grain lorry blocks the only through-road for ten minutes while the driver passes the time of day with the baker. Nobody honks. This is Cubillos, 660 metres above sea level on the high Castilian plateau, where the loudest sound is usually the wind combing through kilometre after kilometre of wheat.

With 294 residents registered – rather fewer actually in residence – the village sits in the middle of Tierra del Pan, literally “Land of Bread”. The name is no marketing flourish. These ochre fields supply flour mills from Valladolid to Salamanca, and the bakery van that rattles in every Friday still sells loaves made from grain harvested within sight of the church tower.

A horizon made of bread

British walkers who arrive expecting hedgerows and cosy lanes need to recalibrate. The landscape is oceanic in scale: 360 degrees of gently rolling cereal punctuated by the occasional stone hut and, on clear days, the snow-dusted ridge of the Sierra de la Paramera 40 kilometres south. There are no footpaths in the English sense; instead you follow wide farm tracks designed for combine harvesters. Bring a GPS or download the free Castilla y León rural track layer – way-marking is sporadic and the wheat soon erases your boot prints, making cross-field shortcuts disorientating.

Spring brings the most comfortable hiking. From late April the soil exhales a warm, biscuity smell and stone-curlew call at dusk. By July the thermometer nudges 36 °C and shade is restricted to the lee of an occasional holm oak. Autumn returns soft light and flocks of skylark, but winter is stark: night temperatures drop to –8 °C and the one grocery-café shutters from November until March.

Mud walls and miradors

Cubillos has never possessed a castle or city walls; its architecture is domestic and agricultural. Houses are built from the ground they stand on – tapial (rammed earth) mixed with straw, finished with lime wash the colour of thick cream. Rooflines sit low against the wind; tiny windows face south to suck in winter sun. Look closely and you can read generations of repair: modern cement patches here, a Victorian brick course there, the whole thing capped with terracotta tiles rolled in the local brickworks at Fresno de la Vega.

The 16th-century chapel of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción is the only monument in town. Its single-nave interior is plain to the point of austerity, but climb the narrow tower staircase (key kept by the mayor’s office, open most weekday mornings) and you get a farmer’s-eye view: a patchwork of brown, green and gold stitched together by tractor trails. On the western edge of the village a line of subterranean wine cellars, dug into the hillside during the 1800s, now store garden tools rather than barrels – phylloxera put paid to local vines long ago.

Eating what the field provides

There is no restaurant, so self-catering is obligatory. The bakery van offers still-warm pan de pueblo; add ajar of raw sheep’s-milk honey sold from a honesty box on the Arévalo road and you have breakfast. For anything more ambitious, shop in advance in Sepúlveda (25 minutes by car) where the Friday market stocks roasted peppers, morcilla de Burgos and the first of the season’s asparagus. A tiny freezer in Cubillos’ grocery holds locally shot rabbit and partridge – handy if you fancy a rustic stew in your rental kitchen.

The nearest proper meal is a 10-minute drive south to El Hornillo, where roadside asador El Rincón de Roberto grills chuletón de Ávila over holm-oak embers. A one-kilogram beef rib-eye feeds two ravenous hikers and costs €38; chips, green pepper and a tumbler of robust Tierra de Castilla red are included. Book at weekends – Madrilenños descend en convoy.

Starlight without the sales pitch

Light-pollution maps show this corner of Segovia province in inky black. Walk 500 metres beyond the last streetlamp, let your eyes adjust for 20 minutes and the Milky Way appears like spilled sugar. Amateur astronomers set up on the disused railway bed north of the village where aggregate ballast provides a steady tripod base. August Perseids are spectacular, but wrap up even in midsummer – night-time dew soaks grass shoes within minutes and the temperature can fall 15 degrees after midnight.

Mobile reception is patchy; 4G flickers on the higher ground near the cemetery but disappears inside the rammed-earth houses. Several cottages advertise Wi-Fi, yet the signal often comes via a 4G router – fine for WhatsApp, hopeless for Zoom. Treat it as a feature rather than a flaw.

Getting there – and away

Cubillos sits on the SG-20 provincial road between Segovia and Ávila. Two Alsa buses run each weekday (one mid-morning, one late afternoon), none on Sundays or public holidays. From Madrid-Barajas, hire a car and head north-west on the A-6 and AP-51; the journey takes 90 minutes if you resist the temptation to stop in medieval Sepúlveda. Petrol stations are scarce once you leave the motorway – fill up in Arévalo where a small Repsol also has an ATM, the last until you reach Ávila.

Accommodation consists of three privately owned casas rurales, two sleeping four, one sleeping eight. Expect stone floors, wood-burning stoves and owners who live in Madrid but hand over keys via a coded box. Nightly rates hover around €90 for the whole house mid-week; July-August and Easter push prices up 30 per cent. Check heating is included if you visit between October and April – nights can be brutal and electricity in Spain is eye-wateringly expensive.

Why bother?

Cubillos will never feature on a “Top Ten Villages” list. It offers no gift shops, no guided tours, no romantic ruins. What it does provide is a ready-made antidote to the Costa Brit-pop soundtrack of fry-ups and Full English. Here you can walk until your boots are powdered with ochre dust, eat bread baked from wheat grown outside your bedroom window, and remember what absolute quiet sounds like. Come for two nights, bring supplies, and let the wheat do the talking.