Castillejo de Robledo

The bread van beeps twice at 10:30 sharp. By 10:31 half the village has appeared in the single main street, carrier bags ready, gossip exchanged in the same breath as the price of a baguette. Castillejo de Robledo, population 101, runs on this timetable. Miss the van and there is no other loaf until tomorrow.

At 962 m the air is thin and clean; phone reception is equally thin. Vodafone flickers on the tiny Plaza Mayor, EE survives near the church, but walk fifty paces uphill towards the castle and the 21st century drops away. What remains is stone – walls, roofs, even the soil between the houses – and a silence so complete that wings overhead make you look up. Expect storks, not skylarks: they nest on every available chimney pot, clacking like festive castanets.

A village that never bothered with a makeover

The Romans marched past, the Moors did not stay, and the railway never arrived. What you see is what the place has looked like since the 12th-century reconquest: a ridge settlement huddled round its church and castle, built from the nearest rock outcrop because carts were scarce. Some houses are still occupied, some are holiday bolt-holes owned by families in Soria or Madrid, and a few stand empty, doors padlocked against the wind that scours the meseta all winter. Planning rules forbid PVC windows in the old quarter; the result is a streetscape of weather-beaten timber and ironwork that would send most heritage officers into raptures, even if a satellite dish sprouts here and there.

The only traffic jam occurs when someone pauses to talk from the car window. Drivers wait – no one honks – then the lane clears and the echo of the engine drifts off across the oaks. There is no petrol station; the nearest pump is 17 km away in San Esteban de Gormaz, so arrivals tend to coast in with the gauge flirting with red and leave clutching a receipt that reminds them how cheap fuel still is on the Spanish plateau.

Up to the castle before the sun turns fierce

The path starts opposite the church, signed “Castillo” in hand-painted capitals. It is steep, stony, and takes twelve minutes if you are fit, twenty if you stop to photograph the view. Trainers are fine; sandals are not. Half-way up, the village contracts into a rust-red roof mosaic, then the horizon opens until you can see the duomo tower of El Burgo de Osma 30 km away. The castle itself is a ruin in the honest sense: waist-high walls, a tumbled keep, and one intact corner good for silhouette shots. Information boards never got funding, so bring imagination or, better, download the town-hall PDF before you leave the UK. The climb is worth it for the breeze alone – even in July the plateau acts like a giant cooling plate once the sun sinks.

Romanesque without the coach parties

Back at church level, the Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción keeps its treasures low-key. Push the heavy door (it is usually unlocked) and let your eyes adjust. The 12th-century tympanum shows the Ascension with the same angular serenity as the better-known doorway at Silos, but here you can stand six inches away without a guard blowing a whistle. Inside, fragments of fresco illustrate the medieval ballad “La Afrenta de Corpes” – a tale of Castilian honour and gore that every Spanish schoolchild once knew. The colours are faded to bruise purples and iron oxides; photography is allowed, flash forbidden. Light a candle if you wish – the box takes one-euro coins and the wax stubs testify that someone still does.

Walking, cycling, mushroom-hunting – all of it self-guided

Castillejo sits on the southern lip of the Montes de Ayllón, but from the village the land looks more like rolling prairie than jagged sierra. A lattice of farm tracks strikes out between holm-oak and wheat fields; any of them can be walked, though way-markers appear and vanish according to the mood of the local council. A favourite circuit heads south-east to the abandoned hamlet of Arconada (4 km), returns via the pine-fringed ravine of Cañada Real. Allow two hours, carry water, and expect to meet more wild boar prints than humans. Mountain-bikers use the same web of paths; the surface is hard-pack until it isn’t, so wider tyres beat skinny road rubber.

October brings mushroomers wielding wicker baskets and the sort of curved knives that would worry customs at Gatwick. If you fancy joining them you need a regional permit (free, downloadable) and the confidence to tell a Caesar’s bolete from its yellow-staining cousin. Novices usually tag along with locals at the weekend – the bar in neighbouring Espejón is the place to ask, preferably over a glass of Ribera del Duero crianza that tastes of blackberry and vanilla without the heavyweight tannin of Rioja.

Food when you can find it

There is no restaurant inside the village boundaries. What passes for gastronomy is the aforementioned bread van and a tiny grocery that opens 09:00-13:00, sells tinned asparagus, tetrabrick milk and, mysteriously, Bombay Sapphire gin. Lunch means driving ten minutes to Espejón or twenty to San Esteban, unless you have booked half-board at the only guest-house, where the owner cooks if given 24 hours’ notice. Menus are short, seasonal and meat-heavy: sopa de ajo (garlic broth with paprika and a poached egg), lechal asado (milk-fed lamb) and, for pudding, leche frita – cold set custard fried in an airy batter then dusted with cinnamon sugar. Vegetarians can usually coax out a pisto manchego (pepper and aubergine stew) but vegans should plan on self-catering.

Tuesday is the universal closing day for eateries across the comarca; turn up unannounced and you will be offered crisps and a coffee at the bar of the petrol station – edible, but a bleak echo of Spanish culinary pride.

When to come, what to pack

Spring is the sweet spot: meadows yellow with cowslips, nights cool enough for sleep, days warm enough to sit outside at noon. Easter processions are low-key – one drummer, one horn, twenty devotees – but the atmosphere is intimate rather than threadbare. Autumn runs a close second with scarlet oak canopies and the mushroom scramble already mentioned. Summer is perfectly bearable if you remember the meseta mantra: do nothing between 14:00 and 17:00. Even in August temperatures dip below 15 °C after midnight; bring a fleece or regret it by 23:00. Winter is brilliant for solitary walkers and photographers who like sepia light, but the wind chill can shave ten degrees off the forecast. Snow arrives sporadically; when it does the access road from the N-122 is cleared early, yet hire-car companies still class the route as “mountainous” and may quibble over winter tyres.

Practical fragments worth knowing

• Cash: the nearest ATM is that 17-km hop to San Esteban; fill your wallet before you leave the airport.
• Fuel: ditto. The village pump closed in 2008.
• Language: the owner of the guest-house speaks school-trip English; everyone else will meet you halfway if you try Spanish, halfway again if you attempt the local accent (drop final ‘s’ sounds, sing the vowels).
• Driving: Madrid-Barajas to Castillejo is 190 km, mostly toll-free motorway. Leave the A-2 at km 102, follow the N-122 through arable prairie that looks like East Anglia on steroids. The final 25 km snake over a low pass; the surface is good, the camber dramatic, and the guardrails reassuringly new.
• Accommodation: three letting rooms above the old schoolhouse, €70 double B&B, Wi-Fi that works if no one is streaming. Alternative is a restored farmhouse 3 km outside with pool and full kitchen, minimum stay two nights.

Parting shot

Castillejo de Robledo will never feature on a “Top Ten Spanish Villages” list because it has no gift shop, no cathedral, and – on a quiet weekday – almost no people. What it offers instead is a chance to calibrate your sense of scale: human against meseta, medieval against modern, silence against the clatter of stork bills. Turn up for the bread-van moment, linger for the castle sunset, and you will understand why some Spaniards still measure distance not in kilometres but in the time it takes for the loaf to cool.