Navajún

The first thing you notice is the hush. At 926 metres, the air thins and sound simply evaporates. Nine residents, two streets, zero traffic lights: Navajún feels less like a village than a pause someone forgot to finish. Stand beside the stone trough that passes for a central square and the loudest noise is your own breathing. Then a tractor coughs once, somewhere below the houses, and the quiet closes again like a door.

That quiet is the main commodity these days. The last shop folded decades ago; the bar unlocks only when the owner’s cousin is down from Bilbao and fancies pouring a few cañas for whoever happens to be passing. Come outside high summer or Easter weekend and you may find the place shuttered, the only movement a dog trotting across the single-lane LR-390 as if it owns the tarmac. Which, strictly speaking, it does.

Stone, Sun and the Smell of Thyme

The houses are built for winter survival, not Instagram colour pops. Granite rubble walls, tiny windows, Arab-tile roofs the colour of burnt toast. Nothing is painted the regulation Andalusian white; the stone is left to weather, so walls turn the same rust-ochre as the track that leads out towards the Sierra del Moncayo. Walk twenty minutes up that track and the village drops away, revealing folds of forest and pasture that look temptingly like proper walking country. They are—provided you carry water, a map and a tolerance for paths that dissolve into goat scratches.

Spring arrives late at this altitude. April can still slap you with an icy northerly, but by May the hillsides flare yellow with Spanish broom and the night-time temperature stops scraping zero. October is the sweet spot: clear skies, 20 °C at midday, and the only crowds a handful of geologists hunting for perfect cubes of pyrite in the abandoned Victoria mine. Try to visit in July and you’ll discover why locals close the shutters at noon; the sun is fierce and shade is rationed. December brings proper snow every couple of years, the LR-390 turns into a bobsleigh run, and the nine villagers stockpile bread like Berlin in ’48.

Lunch is What You Packed

There is no café, no bakery, no petrol pump. The nearest edible supplies sit twenty minutes away in Pradejón, a commuter town whose supermarket stays open through siesta because it also serves the A-12 autopista. Fill the boot there; once you start climbing the LR-123 towards Cervera del Río Alhama the only vending machine is a fig tree beside a ruined shepherd’s hut. Picnic tables do exist—rough planks under a walnut on the south side of the church—but bring your own chorizo and a knife sharp enough to deal with it.

Water matters more than food. The village fountain flows, but the pipe is meant for livestock; if your stomach is British-soft, stick to the bottled stuff. A hat is non-negotiable: the surrounding country is high-steppe dry, the sort of landscape that persuaded a South African mineral collector to mutter “looks like the set of a spaghetti western” on an English-language forum. He wasn’t wrong; you half expect Clint Eastwood to shuffle out of the thyme scrub.

Fossils, Falcons and Footpaths that Fizzle Out

Most visitors who aren’t simply passing through are here for the pyrite. The Victoria mine, ten minutes above the last house, once supplied European universities with textbook-perfect iron cubes. Entry is unofficial—no ticket booth, no hard hat, just a chain across a track and a faded sign telling you the site is “not conditioned for tourism”. Scramble up the scree and you’ll see glittering walls where someone has recently hacked out a fist-sized specimen with a builder’s chisel. Collecting is tolerated in moderation; if you arrive with a sledgehammer and five mates, expect the village mayor (also the tractor driver) to appear faster than you can say “health-and-safety”.

Birdlife is less flashy but easier to carry home. Griffon vultures ride the thermals above the ridge, and a pair of peregrines nests somewhere in the crags behind the mine. Dawn is the time: sit on the low wall by the cemetery gate and you can clock six species before the sun clears the opposite hill, all to a soundtrack of distant goat bells. Serious hikers can link a four-hour loop south-east to the abandoned hamlet of Vadillos, but the path is marked only by cairns the height of a wine bottle; download the GPX before you leave phone signal behind.

Getting There Without a Donkey

Fly to Bilbao (cleaner queues than Barajas) and collect a hire car. The AP-68 drags you south-east past Logroño, then it’s a twisty 45 minutes on minor roads. Total journey time from Heathrow, including the two-hour flight, is under six hours—shorter than reaching most Cornish coves once you factor in the M5 queue. A Bilbao return flight in shoulder season can dip below £90 with hand baggage only; petrol for the round-trip to Navajón adds another €35. Public transport is fiction: the weekday bus from Logroño to Cervera stops four kilometres short at the valley bottom, and the timetable appears to be a rumour.

Accommodation has to be elsewhere. The Bed4U in Logroño is a functional chain motel with free parking and soundproofed rooms, handy if your flight lands late. Closer options are casas rurales in Cervera—stone cottages with wood-burners, around €90 a night for two. None are inside Navajún itself; the village has never heard of a hotel licence and probably issues them with the same frequency as parking tickets.

When the Silence Runs Out

Stay more than a single afternoon and you’ll discover the limits of nothing. By dusk you will have photographed every façade, identified every bird, and still have three hours before the stars really pop. Bring a paperback, or a friend who is happy to debate the merits of Spanish roof tiles without interruption. The place works best as a comma in a longer Rioja itinerary: morning in Laguardia’s wine cellars, lunch among Navajún’s empty streets, evening pinchos in Logroño’s Laurel lane. Treat it as a destination in its own right and you may find yourself counting the nine inhabitants for entertainment.

Come anyway. Stand on the ridge as the light drains westwards and the pyrite cubes in the mine walls catch the last gold. The village lights—three windows and a porch bulb—blink on below, and for a moment you understand why nobody leaves. The fridge may be empty, the bar forever shut, but the silence is stocked full, replenished nightly with every cloud that drifts over the Sierra. Just pack sandwiches, fill the water bottle, and don’t expect Clint Eastwood to buy you a beer.