Foncea

The church bell strikes eleven and nobody stirs. Not the elderly man in a flat cap who has been studying the same patch of whitewashed wall for ten minutes, nor the dog sprawled across the single lane that doubles as the high street. Foncea, population ninety-three, keeps its own tempo—set by wind through the vines, not by the A-68 motorway that roars unseen twenty minutes away. At 692 m the air is thinner than in Haro’s tapas bars below, and noticeably cleaner; breathe in and you taste chalky soil and the faint sweetness of tempranillo leaves that have been sun-warmed since dawn.

This is Rioja Alta’s pocket-sized antidote to bodega tours and stag-party Logroño. No marble tasting halls, no gift-shop fridge magnets, just stone houses that have had the same surnames carved above their lintels since the 1700s and a landscape that alters colour every six weeks—first emerald after spring pruning, then the exhausted yellow of August, finally the burnished copper that makes harvest crews reach for secateurs in late September. The village itself is a five-minute walk from end to end, yet most visitors manage to stretch that to an hour because every façade has a detail worth stopping for: a coat of arms pock-marked by Civil War shrapnel, a wooden doorway reinforced with iron straps forged in nearby Ezcaray, a crumbling bread-oven now filled with geraniums rather than dough.

San Martín de Tours parish church squats at the physical centre, a chunky rectangle of sandstone that looks more agricultural than ecclesiastical. Push the south door—it is seldom locked—and the temperature drops five degrees. Inside, the nave is as plain as a threshing floor, but the afternoon light filtering through alabaster windows turns the dust motes golden and picks out a fifteenth-century polychrome Virgin whose paint has rubbed away except for two bright patches of ultramarine on her mantle. Weekday mass was suspended years ago for lack of parishioners; silence is the main attraction now.

Step back outside and the real museum begins. Foncea’s houses are built from locally quarried limestone, the blocks irregular, the mortar the colour of weak coffee. Rooflines sag like old sofas, yet the structures stand firm; builders here understood that flexibility prevents collapse when the Cierzo wind howls down the Ebro valley in February. Follow any alley east and within two hundred metres tarmac surrenders to a farm track flanked by dwarf walls of dry stone. Look over the wall and you see the village’s true raison d’être: rows of vines planted on lime-rich terraces, each row angled south-east to grab dawn warmth, the heads of the vines kept deliberately low so that the grapes feel the heat reflected from the soil.

Walking is the only activity on offer, but the options multiply once you study the map. A gentle 45-minute loop heads north to the abandoned hamlet of Morillos, where storks nest in the hollow tower of a ruined chapel. A longer haul—three hours, 350 m of ascent—follows the GR-190 long-distance footpath south to the ridge of the Sierra de Cantabria. From the crest you can spot the metallic glint of Bilbao’s Guggenheim on a clear day, forty-five kilometres away as the vulture flies. Winter walkers should pack micro-spikes; at this altitude January frost lingers in shadowed gullies until lunchtime, and the track can ice over. Summer hikers face the opposite problem: shade is scarce, water non-existent once you leave the village, so start at seven when the only noise is the mechanical click of irrigation sprinklers starting up below.

There are no hotels, no rural boutique retreats with infinity pools, just three privately owned cottages that appear on Airbnb when the owners are not using them. The nearest beds are in Haro (22 min by car) or in the wine-press village of San Vicente de la Sonsierra ten kilometres west, where the Posada San Vicente offers eight rooms above a restaurant that serves roast peppers stuffed with salt-cod and a Rioja crianza poured from unlabelled magnums. Foncea itself has no bar, no shop, no petrol station—plan accordingly. The single vending machine outside the ayuntamiento dispenses lukewarm cans of Estrella at €1.50 and is often empty by Sunday evening.

Come in April and you may meet a tractor blocking the lane, its trailer heaped with cuttings that will be burned to fertilise next year’s growth. The driver will wave you past; if you attempt schoolroom Spanish he will reply in clipped Riojan dialect that drops final syllables, but the smile is genuine. October brings the vendimia; gangs of seasonal pickers from Bulgaria and Romania work counter-intuitively fast while local grandfathers supervise, knives glinting. Visitors are not expected to join in, yet if you turn up with sturdy gloves you will usually be handed a crate and instructed which bunches to leave for the late-harvest dessert wine. Payment is a glass of last year’s vintage and half a loaf of bread smeared with fresh tomato and salt.

What Foncea does not do is equally important. There is no interpretation centre, no QR code on the church wall, no multilingual audio guide hissing in your ear. Interpretation is DIY. That absence can feel disorientating if you are fresh from Bilbao’s slick metro system, yet it is also liberating. You are trusted to work things out: why the threshing floors are circular, why the village cemetery sits on the north edge (so the dead look towards the morning sun), why even the smallest house has a wrought-iron balcony large enough for a single flowerpot—because appearance matters more than size when the population is counted in double digits.

The downside? If it rains, there is nowhere to shelter except the church porch. If you arrive after dark the street lighting is so frugal you will wish you had packed a head-torch. August weekends see day-trippers from Vitoria who park campervans by the football pitch (no goals, just two jumpers for posts) and crank up portable barbecues; they leave behind sausage wrappers and the thump of reggaeton until the local policeman—who lives twenty kilometres away—drives up to move them on.

Go anyway, provided you adjust expectations. Foncea will never headline a Spanish itinerary; it works better as a palate-cleanser between the cathedral in Burgos and the restaurants of Logroño. Fill a water bottle in Haro, slip a packet of almonds into your pocket, and aim to reach the village around five when the sun flattens the shadows and the stone walls glow the colour of burnt cream. Walk once round the perimeter track, sit on the low wall opposite the church, and wait. After ten minutes you will hear the hush that exists only in places where traffic is impossible and the loudest sound is a blackbird announcing the change of shift. That hush is Foncea’s real monument—and, unlike everything else, it costs nothing and never closes.