Caballar

The church bell strikes eleven, yet only the swallows hear it. In Caballar, perched at 1,100 metres on the Segovian slope of the Sierra de Guadarrama, sound behaves differently. Wind carries the scent of pine resin across stone roofs, and the granite walls absorb voices rather than reflect them. Eighty souls live here year-round, give or take a birth or funeral, making the village quieter than most British railway stations at 3 a.m.

The Arithmetic of Emptiness

Arrive on a Tuesday in late October and you might count more abandoned houses than inhabited ones. Shutters hang at odd angles, their ironwork rusting into the stone. Yet the place is far from moribund. Someone has swept the dust from the single pavement; a row of red peppers dries on a windowsill; a tractor idles outside the only bar, its driver inside drinking a cortado that costs €1.20—if the owner happens to be in the mood to open. There is no timetable, no tourist office, and certainly no gift shop. The village functions on rural Spanish time, which is to say it functions when it feels like it.

From the tiny mirador beside the cemetery you can see why people stayed here in the first place. The view unrolls for forty kilometres: a patchwork of cereal stubble, holm-oak dehesas and, on clear days, the pylon-studded plateau that leads to Segovia itself. The air is thin enough to make a Londoner light-headed after two flights of stone steps, and the light has the sharp edge that painters travel to Cornwall to capture. Only here there is no Tate gift shop, merely the wind combing the tops of the Scots pines.

Stone, Snow and the Smell of Thyme

The houses are built from what lies underfoot: mottled granite veined with quartz. Walls are a metre thick, keeping interiors at a steady fourteen degrees winter and summer. Many still have the arched stone doorway of the former stable on the ground floor; upstairs, wooden balconies sag under terracotta pots of geraniums. Roofs are tiled with pizarra, thin slabs of slate that creak like old floorboards when the first snow lands. That snow can arrive overnight in November and stay until March, cutting the village off for days. The council keeps one snow-plough for the entire comarca; if it breaks, residents simply wait. They are good at waiting.

Walking tracks leave the upper edge of the village without ceremony—no signposts, no car parks, just a gap between two houses where the tarmac turns to packed earth. Within ten minutes the only sound is your own breathing and the crack of pine cones heating in the sun. A circular route south-east climbs gently through a reforested plantation, then drops into a hollow where wild boar have rooted up the ground like badly ploughed lawn. Roe deer watch from the shadows; their coats are already turning the grey-brown of winter. Allow ninety minutes and carry water: there are no pubs, no ice-cream vans, and mobile reception vanishes the moment you lose sight of the church tower.

What Passes for Gastronomy

Inside the village boundaries the culinary options are, to put it politely, limited. The bar opens when the owner returns from feeding her chickens; if the hunting season has been kind she might serve a plate of wild-boar stew with chickpeas for €6, but do not bet lunch on it. Locals shop in neighbouring Villacastín, eight kilometres down a road that narrows to single-track under overhanging pines. There the supermarket sells everything from chorizo to Cathedral City cheddar, proof that even the Spanish have conceded British cheese tastes exist.

Serious eating means driving twenty minutes to the N-110 and the truck-stop town of San Rafael. At Asador Maribel a quarter of roast suckling pig (cochinillo) costs €18 and feeds two, the skin blistered to the texture of pork crackling, the meat collapsing into milky fat. Order a media ración of judiones—giant white beans stewed with morcilla—and you will understand why Castilians regard cholesterol as a seasonal affliction, like hay fever.

The Politics of Silence

Caballar’s population graph tells a story repeated across interior Spain: 700 inhabitants in 1950, 300 by 1975, 80 today. The primary school closed in 1988; the last grocery followed in 2003. Yet the village fights obsolescence with stubborn ingenuity. A British couple from Winchester bought two ruined houses in 2019, spent lockdown insulating them with hemp, and now run week-long yoga retreats in summer. The ayuntamiento charges €20 per person per night in municipal taxes, money that paid for a new bench beside the fountain. Progress is incremental, measured in benches.

Even so, August can feel crowded. Madrid families rent village houses for the school holidays, bringing inflatable paddle pools and portable barbecues. Cars squeeze past each other on lanes designed for mules; someone’s labrador barks at 2 a.m. and the echo ricochets off stone like gunshot. Visit in late September instead. The nights drop to 6 °C, driving out all but the hardiest, and the dawn chorus resumes exclusive rights to the soundtrack.

Getting There, Staying There

No train comes within thirty kilometres. From Madrid’s Chamartín station take the high-speed AVE to Segovia (27 minutes, €12–€30 depending on advance booking), then pick up a hire car. The final 45 minutes climb through pine forests where wildcats occasionally dash across the asphalt. In winter carry chains—even a dusting of snow turns the last incline into a toboggan run.

Accommodation is the pinch point. There is no hotel, no pension, not even a village Airbnb—yet. The British yoga couple rent their restored house outside retreat weeks (two bedrooms, wood-burner, €90 per night minimum three nights) but availability is sporadic. More reliable beds lie twenty minutes away in Villacastín’s Hostal El Cruce, where €55 buys a clean double, coffee and churros included. Drive up to Caballar for sunrise; the road belongs to you and the occasional delivery van.

Leave before lunch if you insist on certainty. The bar might open, the church might be unlocked, the sky might stay cobalt. Or the village might pull up its drawbridge of silence, leaving you with nothing but the wind and the smell of thyme. Either way, you will have spent a morning at a thousand metres where Spain still keeps its own slow time, and that is more than most guidebooks can offer.