Valdeprado

The church bell still rings at noon, though only eight people remain to hear it. At 843 metres above sea level, Valdeprado sits high enough for the air to feel thinner, sharper, and for mobile reception to give up entirely. Drive north-east from Soria for seventy-odd kilometres, turn onto the SO-P-1124, and the tarmac narrows until wing mirrors brush rosemary growing wild at the verge. Just when the lane seems to dissolve into wheat stubble, stone walls appear, a crumbling arch, then the village—half inhabited, half hollow, entirely indifferent to the twenty-first century.

Silence at siesta time

Summer afternoons smell of hot thyme and sun-baked earth. Shutters are closed against the glare; the only movement comes from swifts cutting across a sky so wide it makes the handful of houses look smaller than they already are. Valdeprado has no bar, no shop, no ATM, no illuminated “open” sign. What it offers instead is decibel-level countryside: larks overhead, the creak of a weather vane, your own boots on gravel. Walk fifty paces and the village is behind you; walk another fifty and cereal fields roll away in every direction, the horizon lifted straight from a Castilian proverb.

Photographers arrive for that horizon. At dawn the plateau glows biscuit-brown, the low sun picking out every stone ridge on abandoned grain stores. By dusk the same land turns metallic, the sky rinsed clean of clouds, colours saturated like an over-exposed slide. Tripods cluster on the dirt track south of the cemetery, but there is never a queue—winter apart, when the access road ices over and locals advise staying away altogether.

Walking without waymarks

Footpaths here predate the Ministry of Tourism. Shepherds’ tracks braid the wheat, linking Valdeprado to similarly shrunken neighbours—Matalebreras, Aldealafuente—each six or seven kilometres distant. None of the routes is signed, so a downloaded GPX file or, better, the sun counts as navigation. A straightforward circuit south-west towards the Sierra de Ojacastro takes two hours, gains 200 metres, and delivers views deep into La Rioja. Take water: the only fountain dried up years ago and the nearest potable supply is back in San Pedro Manrique, 22 kilometres down the hill.

Mountain bikers use the same web of lanes. Traffic volume is zero, surface quality “acceptable” in council speak, which means corrugations and the occasional pothole big enough to swallow a 28 mm tyre. The gradient never steepens into a categorized climb, yet the constant rise and fall adds up: a 40 km loop east to Muriel de la Fuente and home again racks up 600 metres of ascent, reward enough when the only refreshment stop is the figs you remembered to pack.

Roast lamb and other certainties

Food is not a village affair. For lunch you drive, because public transport is mythical and the lone weekly grocery van stopped calling long ago. In San Pedro Manrique, Mesón la Dehesa fires oak logs until the coals whiten, then slots a milk-fed lamb into the clay oven. Forty minutes later the meat arrives—pale, spoon-tender, lightly salted, already partitioned along the rib. A plate costs €18, chips included, and tastes nothing like the cumin-doused shoulder back home. Vegetarians get a grilled piquillo pepper salad and the house Rioja poured short; the barman will not ask if it’s “OK”, he simply sets the bottle on the paper cloth and lets silence do the talking.

Should you prefer to self-cater, stock up in Soria before the final climb. Market day is Friday: look for queso de oveja cured in esparto grass, a wedge that keeps without refrigeration and partners surprisingly well with the local honey sold in re-used Cola Cao jars. Bread, chorizo, tomatoes still warm from the greenhouse—supper on the cottage terrace while the temperature drops ten degrees with the sun.

Where to lay your head

Accommodation does not exist inside the village. The sensible option is Casa del Cura in Muriel de la Fuente, twelve kilometres away, where five attic rooms overlook a garden of lavender and rusted ploughs. Doubles run €70 including breakfast (strong coffee, sponge cake, no muesli), and the owners will lend a key to the medieval chapel next door if you enjoy gloomy Romanesque. Campers can pitch by the river, but nights are cold even in July; frost has been recorded in August, so bring a three-season bag and expect condensation by morning.

Closer to Valdeprado, two cottages have been restored as holiday lets. They sleep four, cost €90 a night minimum two nights, and retain original stone sinks, oak beams, and the faint smell of wood smoke that no diffuser seems able to replicate. Booking is word-of-mouth: email the council office in San Pedro and wait—reply times stretch up to a week, not through rudeness but because the clerk only works Tuesdays and Thursdays.

What passes for a festival

Every August the population swells from eight to eighty. Returning families dust off house keys, hang floral sheets from balconies, and the square hosts a communal paella cooked on a gas ring the size of a tractor wheel. There is no programme to consult; events happen when someone remembers them. A mass at eleven, fireworks at midnight that nobody bothers to clear away next morning. By the 17th the exodus resumes, keys turn, silence re-establishes itself. Book accommodation early if you must witness the resurrection, or avoid mid-August entirely if you came for the quiet.

The honest season

Spring is brief, green, surprisingly sharp. Night frosts can linger until May, but the wheat shoots and the air smells of rain on granite. Autumn brings the stubble burn, columns of smoke rising straight in windless air, the scent of straw turned to carbon. Winter is not picturesque; it is hard. Road ice, empty houses, a sky the colour of pewter. Phones lose charge quickly in the cold, and the nearest hospital is an hour away on roads the gritter sometimes forgets. Summer, paradoxically, can feel too hot—35 °C by midday—yet shade is scarce and the lone café remains resolutely shut.

Come anyway, provided expectations stay modest. Valdeprado offers nothing to tick off, no gift shop, no selfie frame. It gives you instead a yardstick against which to measure how loud, how hurried, how connected life has become elsewhere. When the sun drops behind the corrugated roof of the abandoned school, the plateau turns silver, the bell tolls once more, and you realise the village does not need visitors; it merely tolerates them. That, for some, is worth the entire journey.