Jarilla

The first thing you notice is the sound. Not church bells or scooter engines, but absolute quiet, broken only by the clatter of a farmer’s gate and the soft shuffle of oak leaves at 495 metres up. Jarilla, a scatter of stone houses wedged into the Ambroz Valley, has roughly 120 permanent neighbours. One pub, one hotel, zero petrol stations. Mobile reception flickers in and out like a tired lighthouse. For British drivers fresh off the A-5 it feels like someone pressed mute on the motorway.

A village that fits in your pocket

You can walk the entire grid in twelve minutes. Calle Real, the only paved street wide enough for two cars to pass, runs past cottages the colour of biscuit dough. Walls are thick enough to swallow midday heat; in winter they hoard the cold instead. Chimneys wear little stone hats, a local trick to stop embers jumping onto terracotta roofs. There is no plaza mayor in the usual Spanish sense, just a widening where the church sits – locked unless it’s Sunday – and a bench that faces west so the elderly can judge the sunset.

Architecture buffs expecting arcaded squares will leave empty-handed. What you get is everyday Extremadura: granite quoins, timber doors cut from 200-year-old holm oak, and the occasional Victorian-style balcony added by a returned emigrant who made money in Cuba. The appeal is the completeness of it all. Nothing is staged for Instagram; laundry still hangs from first-floor irons, and the loudest colour comes from a geranium someone forgot to water.

Walking without waymarks

North of the last house the tarmac gives up. A farm track continues between dehesa oaks whose trunks have been nibbled smooth by decades of goats. This is public land, used for cork, charcoal and free-range pork, but don’t expect signposts. The route to the abandoned charcoal platform is learnt by asking the man mending a fence – he’ll point with his secateurs and say “seguido, recto” until you reach a clearing where black dust still glitters.

Allow ninety minutes for the circular loop that dips to the Arroyo de la Yedra. After rain the clay grips like theatre carpet; proper boots beat trainers every time. You’ll share the path with nothing more threatening than a Spanish terrapin and the distant bark of a mastiff guarding sheep. Binoculars are useful: griffon vultures wheel overhead, and if you sit still long enough a red deer may step out at dusk.

What passes for cuisine

Food choices are binary. Option one: bring your own. Option two: Hotel Restaurante Jarilla on the edge of the village. The dining room has the fluorescent honesty of a transport café, but the presa ibérica – a shoulder cut from acorn-fed pigs – is grilled over holm-oak embers and costs €9. Chips come thick, golden and showered with rock salt. Vegetarians get a plate of pisto (ratatouille topped with a fried egg) and a shrug that says “this is rural Spain”. Pudding is usually cuajada, a sheep’s-milk curd that tastes like yoghurt with a degree in philosophy. House red is from nearby Cañamero; at €2.50 a glass it would be rude not to.

If you’re self-catering, stock up in Hervás, 18 minutes down the EX-205. The town market on Tuesday morning sells chestnuts in autumn, wild asparagus in spring, and cheese that ranges from squeaky-fresh to “old sock”. Bring cash; many stalls still treat cards as a passing fad.

Seasons that change the volume

April turns the surrounding hills an almost hurtful green. Temperatures sit in the low twenties, perfect for scrambling up to the ruined watchtower above the village – really just a rectangle of stones, but the view stretches south to the silver line of the Ambroz reservoir. May brings out the nightingales; locals claim they sing louder here because it’s quiet. Who’s to argue?

October is russet time. Chestnut trees planted in the 1950s cover the higher slopes and drop glossy nuts that villagers collect in plastic washing-up bowls. The hotel closes its dining room on random Mondays, so phone ahead. Weekends see day-trippers from Cáceres, but numbers are laughably small: twenty cars is a stampede. In winter the altitude bites. Night frost is common, and the EX-205 can ice over where the road bridges a stream. Chains are rarely needed, but a scraper for the windscreen is essential. On the plus side you get brass-coloured dawn light and the smell of wood smoke drifting across the road like a ghost.

How to do it without tears

Fly to Madrid or Seville, collect a hire car and head west on the A-5. Turn off at Navalmoral, follow the C-502 through Hervás, then take the EX-205 for the final 12 km. The last stretch corkscrews; if you meet a tractor the passing place is whoever backs up fastest. Petrol pumps are in Hervás or Baños; after that the needle stays where it is. There is no bank, no shop, and the village Wi-Fi password changes according to the mayor’s memory. Download offline maps and bring euros in small notes.

Accommodation is either the aforementioned Hotel Restaurante Jarilla (doubles €50, heating that works, dogs welcome) or casas rurales scattered through the valley. The nearest alternative beds are in Segura de Toro, a 15-minute drive along a lane where GPS occasionally advises you to turn into a field.

The honest verdict

Jarilla will not keep you busy for a week. It might not keep you busy for a day. What it offers is a pause – somewhere to arrive at four o’clock, dump the suitcase, walk until the only thing on the horizon is a shepherd on a mule, then be back in time for a glass of red before the sun drops behind the sierra. If that sounds like time well wasted, book the hotel. If you need cathedrals, craft beer and Uber, keep driving. The village will not mind. It barely noticed you arrived.