Cepeda la Mora

The frost on the granite doorframes is still thick at eleven o’clock when the first diesel engine coughs into life somewhere below the church. In Cepeda la Mora, 1,540 m above sea level, mornings start when the thermometer says so, not when the guidebooks suggest. Seventy registered souls share 36-odd houses, a parish church the colour of storm clouds and a road that twists uphill for 18 km from the N-502 between Ávila and the Alberche valley. The bar that doubles as grocery, hardware stall and gossip exchange opens only on Fridays and Saturdays; arrive on a Tuesday with an empty rucksack and you will dine on whatever you carried in.

Granite rules every surface: walls, lintels, the low benches built into façades, even the troughs that once watered mules now hold rosemary blowing sideways in the wind. Roofs are steep, slate-hung and weighed down with stones against the gales that rake the Sierra de Gredos from October to May. Few dwellings rise above two storeys; the idea is to keep heat, not flaunt it. Peek through an open gate and you will spot the original bread oven hollowed into the party wall, still blackened from the last loaf baked when the family came up for August.

Winters last six months and arrive overnight. The first snow can fall in mid-October and stay until early May; locals keep two sets of chains in the car and a shovel by the door. When drifts block the access road – usually two or three times each winter – the village swaps vehicles for skis stored in the old schoolhouse and continues life at walking pace. Mobile reception vanishes with the first blizzard; WhatsApp groups freeze along with the pipes. Summer weekends bring the reverse invasion: cars with Madrid plates nose into every alcove, turning the single street into a single-lane puzzle. The silence that defines the place returns only after Sunday supper when thermoses clink and tail-lights disappear round the first bend.

Stone that Learned to Breathe

The Church of San Andrés, rebuilt in 1953 after a fire, looks older than its years because the stone is the same as the houses: rough-coursed granite hacked from the nearest quarry. Step inside and the temperature drops another five degrees; walls are a metre thick, windows mere slits. The altarpiece is plain, the colour of wheat, carved by a workshop in nearby Piedrahíta rather than some distant atelier. Sunday mass is held twice a month unless the priest is snowed in at the seminary; the bell still marks the Angelus, though now it is triggered by a timer that forgets daylight-saving. Locals claim the bell once cracked in a 1940s storm; the hairline split still hums an octave lower when the wind blows from the east.

No interpretive panels explain the architecture – the village is not that kind of museum – yet details speak plainly. Wooden balconies, never wider than a single plank, jut only on the south side of each house; the north walls stay blind to keep out the wind. Door heights vary: the left half of a paired gate is lower, sized for sheep, the right for a laden mule. Iron rings set into façades once tethered the animals while grain was unloaded; children now use them as goalposts.

Walking the Old Trade Lines

Three footpaths leave the upper fountain, each following mule tracks that pre-date the tarmac. The shortest climbs 3 km to the Cueva del Águila, a granite amphitheatre where vultures nest; allow ninety minutes and carry more water than you think – the altitude dries the throat faster than kilometres suggest. The second path heads south-east along the ridge to Navacepeda de Tormes, seven kilometres of roller-coaster grazing land where every gate must be closed behind you. The third, least way-marked, descends 600 m to the Alberche river, useful mainly for fishermen who don’t mind hauling trout back uphill.

Spring arrives late and all at once: between 1 May and 10 May the broom explodes into yellow so bright it reflects off kitchen walls. By June the high pastures smell of thyme and sheep milk; shepherds still move cattle up to the brañas, the stone corrals on the tree line, and sleep in stone huts whose roofs are built from the same slabs that floor the village houses. Hikers who expect signposts every kilometre will be disappointed; those who can read cairns, hoof prints and the position of the sun will manage fine.

What Passes for Night-life

Evenings centre on the plaza in front of the church, really nothing more than a widening of the street. Somebody drags out the metal table donated by the regional government in 2006, chairs appear from cellar storerooms, and the dominoes begin. Play is fast, commentary faster, bets are counted in centimos and pride. Outsiders are welcome to kibitz but should know the local rule: doubles must be announced before they hit the table or the round is void. When the wind picks up, cardigans button tighter; when the moon is full, the game breaks earlier because everyone wants to walk home before the frost re-freezes the paths.

Darkness here deserves its own paragraph. At 1,500 m, with the nearest streetlight 18 km away, night is a physical substance. On clear evenings the Milky Way throws a shadow; satellites cross the sky like slow fireworks. Bring a red torch if you plan to move around – white light ruins star vision for twenty minutes and marks you as a city amateur. The village switches off its four public lamps at 01:00 sharp to save money; after that, sounds replace sights: dogs on distant farms, a chainsaw starting pre-dawn to beat the firewood ban, the church bell tolling the hour even though nobody asked.

Supplies, Fuel and the Art of Self-Reliance

There is no hotel, no pension, no café. Accommodation means one of four privately owned village houses rented by the week; expect wood-burning stoves, solar showers that sag in cloudy weather, and Wi-Fi that works until the router freezes. Prices hover round €90 a night for a two-bedroom house in high season, dropping to €55 once the clocks go back. Booking is handled by word of mouth: ring the number painted on the old bakery wall and leave a message – María Jesús will call back when she drives into coverage on her way to the vet.

Food shopping requires forward planning. The Friday fish van reaches the plaza at 11:30, bringing hake from the coast 200 km away kept on ice since dawn. Bread arrives frozen in a white van, bakes in transit, and sells out in twenty minutes. For everything else, drive 25 minutes to El Barraco where two small supermarkets open until 21:00 and the butcher knows how to cut entraña properly. Vegetarians should note: local growers produce potatoes, beans and apples; anything green and leafy came up the mountain in the same car as you.

Petrol is the great anxiety. The village pump closed in 1998; the nearest station is 22 km east in Navalmoral. Rule of thumb: fill up before you leave the main road, and again before the return climb. In winter keep the tank half-full in case the pass closes and you need to idle the engine for heat while snowploughs argue over jurisdiction.

Going Home, or Not

Departure day often coincides with the moment you finally stop checking the clock. The mobile battery, mercilessly honest, forces a return to digital time, but the village keeps its own rhythm a little longer in the calves and lungs. The descent to the valley feels faster than the climb up, yet the road has not shortened; it is simply that the ear readjusts to engine noise and the eye to concrete. In the rear-view mirror the houses shrink to a single granite stripe between sky and pasture. The thermometer in the car rises degree by degree; by the time you reach the N-502, normal service has resumed – coffee at €2.50, a queue at the roundabout, signal bars jumping back to life. Whether that feels like progress or loss depends on how much silence you can still carry inside the city.