Isona i Conca Dellà

The shepherd leans on his stick, pointing not at sheep but at three-toed indentations in grey limestone. "Raptor," he says in Catalan, tracing the 65-million-year-old claw marks with his crook. This is breakfast-time in Isona i Conca Dellà, and the day's first tour group hasn't even left the bar.

At 659 metres above sea level, the village sits in a natural amphitheatre where the Pyrenees start to flex their muscles. What looks like scrubby badlands from the roadside reveals itself as one of Europe's richest Cretaceous sites. The ground beneath your boots contains crocodile eggs, sauropod tracks and enough fossil bone to keep palaeontologists grinning for decades.

Reading Rocks and Roman Stones

The Conca Dellà Museum occupies a former schoolhouse on Carrer Major. English captioning is thorough, rare in these parts, and the glass cases hold thigh bones taller than your average eight-year-old. Admission is €5; staff will hand over a laminated quarry map that turns the surrounding landscape into a giant Where's-Wally of prehistory. Without it, most visitors walk straight past the footprints embedded beside the road to Basturs.

Romanesque churches appear every few kilometres like medieval bus stops. Santa Maria de Covet, eleven kilometres north, has a doorway carved with grappling lions that wouldn't look out of place in Durham Cathedral – except here you're alone apart from the swallows nesting in the bell tower. The key hangs in the bakery opposite; ask for "la clau de l'església" and the baker will wipe flour from her hands, chat price of lamb, and send you off with directions that involve "the second olive tree after the concrete pig shed".

Isona's own fortified core still follows the arrow-straight line of the old ramparts. House walls incorporate Roman ashlars; one garage door is framed by a 2,000-year-old arch that once supported a watchtower. Planning laws forbid altering the fabric, so satellite dishes sprout like mushrooms from ancient stone. The effect is oddly honest: history as everyday utility, not museum piece.

Empty Roads, Full Plates

A hire car is non-negotiable. The nearest railway station is 55 kilometres away in Lleida, and the daily bus from there carries more bread crates than passengers. Petrol pumps in Isona observe siesta with religious fervour; fill up in Tremp before you arrive or risk spending the night with the fossils.

Once mobile, the network of farm tracks delivers effortless picnic spots. Buy a pa de pagès – a crusty loaf the size of a steering wheel – and a wedge of tupí, the local sheep's cheese matured in olive oil. Add tomatoes still warm from a garden hedge-row and you have lunch for two under €6. Wash it down with house wine from Costers del Segre; it's light enough for lunchtime and costs less than bottled water back home.

Evenings centre on the two restaurants that face each other across the tiny plaça. Both serve the same mountain staples: xai al forn (lamb roasted with rosemary) and trinxat, a cabbage-potato hash that tastes like bubble-and-squeak's Catalan cousin. Vegetarians must specify "sense cansalada" or the hash arrives studded with bacon. Monday and Tuesday find both kitchens closed; self-cater or book half-board with one of the village houses that rent rooms above the bakery.

Walking Through Deep Time

Signposted routes leave the village in three directions. The shortest, a 3-kilometre loop, skirts the old quarry where cement works once blasted dinosaur tracks to rubble. Information boards show black-and-white photos of 1950s miners leaning on dynamite boxes beside perfectly preserved prints. The irony stings: industrial destruction revealed the very treasures it destroyed.

Longer paths climb onto the upland cereal plateau. In May the fields are a patchwork of scarlet poppies and emerald wheat; by August everything has faded to bronze. Waymarking is sporadic – stone cairns replace paint blazes – so download the free Wikiloc tracks before you set out. Mobile signal vanishes within 500 metres of the last house.

Serious walkers can use Isona as a launch pad for the Congost de Mont-rebei, a limestone gorge deeper than Cheddar but without the tea shops. It's a 40-minute drive on a road that narrows to single-track with passing places; meet a tractor and someone reverses half a kilometre. The payoff is a cliff-edge footbridge where griffon vultures circle below eye-level.

When the Fiesta Hits

For fifty weeks of the year the village hums at tractor-volume. Then, on the last weekend of August, the population quadruples. Brass bands march at 3 a.m., castellers build human pyramids in the space where you parked, and the lamb spit turns non-stop behind the church. It's brilliant, chaotic and impossible to sleep through. Accommodation booked up by May; latecomers stay in Tremp and drive in for the firework finale that sets car alarms wailing across the valley.

Winter brings its own hush. Snow is fleeting but night temperatures dip below freezing well into April. Hotels switch off heating at 22:00 to save diesel; pack pyjamas and expect morning frost inside the bathroom window. The upside is crystalline air and the chance to have the fossil trail entirely to yourself, boot prints the first human marks in fresh mud since the Cretaceous.

Leaving the Time Machine

Isona i Conca Dellà offers no souvenir magnets, no Costa karaoke, no sea view. What it does give you is the Spain that school geography forgot: a place where geology, archaeology and everyday life still share the same cracked limestone stage. Come prepared for closed doors on Sunday afternoon, for restaurant menus that don't translate, for mobile black spots that force you to look up at lammergeiers instead of down at screens. Bring a phrasebook, a fleece and curiosity. The dinosaurs have already done the hard work of sticking around; the least you can do is walk in their footsteps.