San Roman de Cameros

The church bell strikes midday and the only reply is a tractor reversing down Calle Mayor. At 841 metres above sea-level, San Román de Cameros doesn’t do noise unless it’s strictly necessary. The village sits on a wooded ridge above the Leza gorge, stone houses clamped to the slope like limpets, their wooden balconies painted the same ox-blood red you’ll see on Rioja bottles 35 minutes away in Logroño.

This is Spain stripped of flamenco and fanfare. Locals number 126 on a good week, swell to perhaps 180 when grandchildren arrive for August. They still keep goats in ground-floor stalls, still stack hay in lofted pajares reached by external stone stairs. One bakery opens three mornings a week; the nearest cash machine is 18 kilometres away. Come expecting souvenir tea-towels and you’ll leave empty-handed. Come prepared to walk, listen and eat dinner at ten past nine, and the place starts to make sense.

Walking the Clockwise Circle

Park by the stone trough at the entrance—there’s no charge and no attendant—and set off on foot. The village loop is barely a mile, but gravity makes it feel longer. Cobbled lanes climb past houses built from the mountain itself: mottled sandstone blocks, slate roofs heavy with lichen. Every so often an alley spits you out onto a sudden terrace where the view resets: folded green ridges, a red kite sliding sideways on the thermals, the white flash of a village water tank far below.

Half-way round, duck through the low arch beside the parish church. Inside it’s cool, dim and country-plain: a single Baroque altar, local ironwork candlesticks, the smell of beeswax and old hymnals. Step out again and you’re facing the mirador, a cantilevered platform that hangs over the valley like a ship’s prow. Plaques name the distant summits—Moncalvillo, San Lorenzo—though the real pleasure is working out which fold of woodland hides the track to the next village, Ajamil, three hours away on foot.

Paths are way-marked but not tamed. The GR-190 long-distance trail brushes the northern edge of San Román, then drops into sweet-chestnut forest before climbing to the ruins of an 11th-century monastery at Yuso. Even in May you can meet snow flurries above 1,300 metres; by July the same trail is dusty and cicada-loud. Carry water—there are no cafés between hamlets—and download the route the night before; phone signal vanishes within 200 metres of the last house.

What Appears on the Table

Food follows the thermometer. Winter means patatas a la importancia, thick slices of potato coated in egg and saffron broth, gentle enough for children yet interesting enough for jaded palates. Spring brings setas—giant oyster mushrooms gathered at dawn—simply grilled with garlic and parsley. Whenever the thermometer drops below five degrees, someone fires up the vine-shoot grill and produces a chuletón: a rib-eye the size of a steering wheel, salted 40 minutes ahead, seared bloody and served with a green pepper that still holds the morning’s frost.

The only place that takes walk-ins is Bar El Pozo on Plaza de la Cruz. Otherwise ring ahead—mobile numbers are painted on doors. House tinto comes from the Albelda cooperative further down the valley; it costs €2.20 a glass and tastes of mulberries and graphite. Finish with queso camerano, a semi-soft goat cheese that lacks the barnyard tang Brits fear; the maker, Jesús, keeps 80 animals and sells from a fridge in his garage, €8 a wheel, cash only.

Getting Up and Getting Away

You need wheels. The LR-250 from Logroño snakes uphill for 28 kilometres, hair-pinning through holm-oak and then beech. In winter the surface ices quickly; carry chains even if the hire company shrugs. The nearest all-night fuel is a Repsol on the Logroño ring-road—fill there, because the mountain station at Ortigosa closes at lunchtime and doesn’t reopen on Sundays.

Bilbao is the simplest gateway: two hours on the A-68, no tolls after Vitoria. Santander adds 15 minutes but the coastal approach is prettier. Madrid works if you’re already in the capital, yet tolls nudge €25 and the traffic round Aranda can be grim. Buses exist—Monday to Friday, one departure at 07:05, return at 14:30—but they leave you stranded if the weather turns.

Accommodation is thin. Casa Sicilia has four rooms above the old wine press, beams blackened by 300 years of smoke, Wi-Fi that copes with email but not Zoom. Weekends book out with Logroño couples seeking silence; mid-week you might have the place to yourself. Expect €85 bed-and-breakfast, no single-night discount. There is no campsite; wild camping is tolerated above the tree-line but fires are banned from May to October.

When to Time Your Escape

April and May deliver daylight until eight-thirty and meadows loud with cow-bells. Temperatures reach 18 °C in the sun yet drop to 5 °C the moment cloud covers the ridge—pack a fleece and a waterproof, even for a day walk. September repeats the trick, plus mushroom forays and the grape harvest; the village smell shifts from wild thyme to fermenting juice.

July and August are hot in the valley (32 °C) but nights stay cool; Spanish families arrive and the single bar extends hours until midnight. November can be spectacular—beech woods the colour of burnt toast—but fog locks the village in until noon and the church bells feel suddenly closer. January brings snow that lasts days; chains become compulsory and the bakery simply doesn’t open. Photographers love it, walkers less so.

The Honest Verdict

San Román de Cameros offers no epiphanies, no Instagrammable infinity pool. It gives instead the small pleasure of walking out at dawn while the meadows are still ghost-grey, hearing only your boots and someone’s rooster three valleys away. Stay one night and you’ll tick it off by lunchtime; stay three and you start recognising the butcher’s dog, start timing your day by the sun hitting the balcony at 11:03. That’s when you realise the village isn’t remote—London is.