Ausejo de la Sierra

The tractor appears at 7:43 am precisely, rattling past the stone houses with the sort of reliability British Rail can only dream of. It's carrying two elderly farmers and a hay bale, and it's the morning rush hour in Ausejo de la Sierra—population somewhere between thirty and a hundred, depending on who's counting and whether the grandchildren are visiting.

At 1,096 metres above sea level, this isn't a village that happened to be built in the mountains. It's a place that seems to have been carved directly from them, each house quarried from the same limestone that forms the ridges behind. The stone here isn't the honey-coloured stuff of Cotswold postcards; it's grey and serious, the colour of November skies over the North Sea. It weathers well. Everything here weathers well, including the people.

The Geography of Silence

Getting to Ausejo requires a philosophical adjustment. From Soria city, it's forty-five minutes on the SO-820, a road that narrows with each kilometre until you're negotiating bends that would make a Scottish Highland bus driver wince. The last stretch climbs 300 metres in three kilometres, past abandoned cortijos where barn doors hang at angles that suggest they've given up on ever being closed again. Phone signal dies somewhere around the 900-metre mark. This isn't a bug; it's a feature.

The village sits on a shelf of land that feels scooped from the mountainside by a giant hand. To the north, the land falls away towards the Duero basin in a series of folds that catch the light like corrugated iron. To the south, the peaks of the Sistema Ibérico rise another 800 metres, their slopes covered in Scots pine that the locals call pino albar. The air here has weight to it—thin enough to make climbing stairs an interesting experience for the first day, dry enough to turn British lips to parchment within hours.

What Passes for a Centre

There isn't one, not really. The village clusters around the fifteenth-century church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, but calling this a centre would imply some sort of urban planning. Instead, houses spiral out from the church like a stone snail shell, their walls thick enough to have kept out both winter winds and, presumably, the tax collectors of various centuries. The streets—calle is generous; they're more stone channels between houses—are barely wide enough for the tractor that serves as public transport, delivery van and mobile gossip service.

The architecture speaks of poverty turned practical. Windows are small, doors are large enough to admit a mule, and every house has a corral—a walled courtyard where animals once wintered alongside their owners. Now these spaces hold barbecue sets and plastic chairs, the Spanish equivalent of British decking culture but with more authentic mud. The stone roofs, originally laid by craftsmen who knew their work would outlast them by centuries, sag in the middle like elderly cats. It's not picturesque decay; it's simply how buildings age when nobody's making Instagram content about them.

The Calendar That Matters

Life here follows rhythms that would puzzle anyone used to British opening hours. The bar—singular—opens when Miguel feels like it, which is usually around 11 am unless he's gone to Soria for feed supplies. It closes for lunch at 2 pm, reopens at 5 pm if there's a football match, and might stay open until midnight if the game's good and the wine hasn't run out. The wine is local, costs €1.20 a glass, comes with free tapas that could constitute lunch if you're not fussy about vegetables.

August changes everything. The fiesta patronal transforms the village from thirty residents to three hundred overnight. Houses that have stood empty since their owners moved to Zaragoza in 1982 suddenly sprout washing lines and satellite dishes. The plaza—really just a widening in the road where the tractor can turn—hosts a sound system that would shame a small British festival. There's a paella contest judged by women who've been making it for sixty years and will tell you, politely but firmly, that your sofrito is wrong. The church bell rings every hour, not for religious reasons but because someone's nephew is visiting and wants to pull the rope.

September brings the matanza, though it's quieter now than when every family killed their own pig. The smell of morcilla being made still drifts from certain houses, mixing with wood smoke from stoves that burn oak cut from the surrounding hills. British visitors might find this medieval; the villagers find it Tuesday.

Walking Into the Past

The best way to understand Ausejo is to leave it. Paths radiate out like spokes, following routes that predate any map. The one to Muriel de la Fuente drops 400 metres through pine forest in two kilometres, past abandoned terraces where wheat once grew at altitudes that would make a Cumbrian farmer weep. Another climbs to the Puerto de Santa Inés at 1,400 metres, where the views stretch south to Teruel on clear days. These aren't routes in the British sense—no waymarkers, no stiles, no tea shops. Just stone cairns every few hundred metres, built by shepherds who needed to find their way home in blizzards that could start in October and linger until May.

The walking is demanding. Distances deceive; what looks like a gentle stroll on the map involves 300-metre climbs at angles that turn calves to jelly. Weather changes faster than British politics—sunshine at 10 am can become sleet by noon, and the wind that sweeps up from the Ebro valley carries the sort of cold that penetrates Gore-Tex like it's tissue paper. Proper boots are essential, water more so, and telling someone where you're going isn't paranoia—it's basic survival.

The Honest Truth About Eating

There are no restaurants. There are no shops. The nearest supermarket is twenty-five kilometres away in Soria, and it closes for siesta like everything else in Spain that hasn't quite grasped the concept of customer service. Self-catering isn't optional; it's mandatory. The apartment rental on the village edge—three rooms, wood-burning stove, views that would cost millions in the Lake District—costs €60 a night and comes with a warning that hot water is solar-heated, so Tuesday's shower might be Thursday's if the weather's been grim.

What you can buy is proximity to some of Spain's least-known food traditions. The asador in Muriel, twelve kilometres down the mountain, serves cordero lechal—milk-fed lamb roasted in wood ovens built into the wall, so tender it falls from the bone like a guilty secret. The honey from beekeepers in the next valley tastes of thyme and rosemary, crystallises into something you could stand a spoon in, costs €8 a jar from houses where you knock and hope someone's home. During mushroom season (October, when the village smells of pine and earth), locals will point you towards níscalos if you ask nicely and speak enough Spanish to understand the difference between edible and te vas a morir.

Leaving Without Really Leaving

The drive down feels shorter than the journey up, though the road hasn't improved. Phone signal returns gradually, like a modernity you didn't realise you'd lost. Soria appears—a city of 40,000 that suddenly feels like Manhattan after three days where the loudest sound was your own breathing. The hotel has Wi-Fi that actually works, hot water that arrives on demand, a bar where you can order a gin and tonic without explaining what gin is.

But something's different. The mountains behind you have weight, presence. They'll be there when the Costa del Sol has sunk beneath rising seas, when the Camino de Santiago has become a theme park, when Barcelona finally tells tourists to please just stop. Ausejo de la Sierra will still have thirty residents, give or take, still be waiting for August when everyone comes home, still be producing lamb and honey and people who know which mushrooms won't kill you.

Whether that's worth a three-hour detour from Madrid depends entirely on whether you think travel should change you, or just your Instagram feed.