Vegas de Matute

The church bell strikes nine and the only reply is a dog barking somewhere beyond the wheat. At 1,050 m, Vegas de Matute is already warm in July sun, yet the air carries a thin edge that reminds you Madrid is only an hour away but several hundred metres below. This is Segovia’s high plateau, where the Meseta lifts itself towards the Guadarrama and villages survive on grain, sheep and the stubbornness of 370 residents who refuse to treat their hometown as a weekend theme park.

The slow altitude

British drivers coming from the A-1 at kilometre 108 peel off onto the CL-601, climb through pine plantations and suddenly find the horizon opening like a rolled map. Vegas de Matute appears not with a flourish but with a shrug: a cluster of ochre roofs, a single tower, and fields that run to the sky. The altitude matters. Mornings can start at 8 °C even in August; by teatime the thermometer may touch 28 °C, but the breeze stops it ever feeling sticky. In winter the same road is gritted nightly—snow is common from December to March—and the village switches to a quieter gear. Weekenders disappear, the solitary bar halves its hours, and the smell of oak smoke drifts from chimneys at dusk.

Walking shoes are advisable rather than hiking boots. A lattice of farm tracks, way-marked by the regional government as “senderos de pequeño recorrido”, loops for 6–12 km across rolling cereal terraces. There are no crags, no via ferrata, just skylarks and the occasional red-legged partridge that whirrs up from the stubble. OS-style maps can be downloaded free from the Junta de Castilla y León; phone coverage is patchy once you drop into the dry stream beds, so screenshot the route before leaving the tarmac.

Stone, adobe and the odd satellite dish

No gift shops, no multilingual menus, not even a town square in the Andalusian sense. The centre is a triangular patch of concrete with a stone cross where the road forks. Around it, houses grow organically: lower floors in granite, upper walls in sun-baked adobe, rooflines sagging like old sofas. Some have been restored by families who fled to Madrid in the seventies and have now retired; others remain shuttered, their wooden balconies bowed, swallows nesting under the eaves. Planning laws are strict—uPVC is frowned upon—yet satellite dishes bloom from chimneys, proving that Netflix reaches even the high plateau.

The fifteenth-century parish church of San Andrés is open only for Sunday mass at eleven. Arrive earlier and the key hangs next door at number 14, where Doña Feli, president of the local amas de casa, will lend it with the warning that the tower stairs are “algo estrechas”. The climb is worth the calf burn: from the roof the countryside arranges itself into a chessboard of greens and umbers, the Sistema Central a jagged paper-cut to the south-east.

Eating between harvests

There is no restaurant. The bar, La Parada, opens at seven for coffee and churros, closes at three, then again at eight for beer and tapas. On Fridays it does a set lunch of judiones—buttery Segovian butter beans stewed with chorizo—for €9 including wine. Otherwise you drive ten minutes to Navas de Oro where Casa Martín grills milk-fed lamb in wood-fired asadores. Vegetarians should stock up in Segovia before heading uphill; the local cuisine answers to centuries of sheep-farming and cold winters.

Self-caterers fare better. A mobile shop selling fruit, bread and tinned goods rattles into the village on Tuesday and Thursday mornings; prices are scribbled on cardboard and cheaper than city supermarkets. The bakery in neighbouring Torreadrada bakes empanadas of tuna and piquillo pepper that travel well for picnics. If you rent one of the three village houses on Airbnb, the owners (all cousins) leave a bottle of local red and instructions to water the geraniums—altitude sun is fierce by eleven.

When the fields turn gold

Timing alters the experience. In late May the plateau is a green ocean rippling in the wind; by mid-July the wheat turns ochre and combine harvesters drone like distant bombers. September brings stubble and the faint smell of straw; October mornings are wine-glass clear, the distant mountains suddenly sharp enough to count individual pines. Photographers should aim for the half-hour after sunrise—low light picks out the stone texture of walls and the metallic glint of a 1950s tractor abandoned in a field. Midday is hopeless; the high sun flattens everything into beige porridge.

Fiestas erupt in the second weekend of August. The population quadruples as descendants return from Valladolid, Barcelona, even Swindon. Brass bands play pasodobles in the concrete triangle, cider flows from plastic barrels, and at two a.m. teenagers set off fireworks that ricochet between the houses. Visitors are welcome but beds disappear fast; book accommodation in March or accept a sofa in Burgos. The quieter alternative is the Romería de San Isidro in mid-May, when locals walk 4 km to a meadow, share cocido stew from caldrons and return by sunset—no ear-splitting pyrotechnics, just an excuse to gossip under the oaks.

Getting there, getting out

Public transport is fiction. Car hire from Madrid-Barajas takes 75 minutes via the A-1 and costs roughly £30 a day for a week’s rental. Petrol is cheaper than Britain but toll-free; the only charge is a €5.50 section of the old N-1 if you want to skip the truck traffic. In winter carry snow chains even if the forecast is benign—a sudden frontal system can whiten the road in twenty minutes. The nearest reliable petrol is at Villacastín, 18 km south; after midnight the pumps switch to card-only and Spanish chip-and-pin can baffle older UK cards, so fill up before dusk.

Accommodation is limited. The three Airbnb cottages sleep four to six, charge £70–£90 a night and include Wi-Fi that struggles once someone streams iPlayer. Two rural hotels in Navas de Oro offer ensuite doubles for £55, but you lose the dawn hush. Campers are tolerated in the municipal recreation ground outside fiesta week; there are no showers, just a cold tap and the bemused curiosity of shepherds exercising their dogs at 6 a.m.

Leave before checkout and the village will already be back to its baseline murmur—an old man sweeping his threshold, a woman pegging sheets that flap like flags against the sky. Vegas de Matute does not deliver epiphanies; it offers something subtler: a calibrated lesson in how much, or how little, human company and vertical metres can alter the texture of a day.