Colmenar de Oreja

The 337 bus from Madrid's Conde de Casal stop judders through industrial estates and housing blocks until suddenly the land folds open. Vineyards appear. Then a golden ridge crowned by a brick church tower. Forty-five kilometres from the capital, Colmenar de Oreja still measures time by the grape harvest, not the metro timetable.

At 761 metres above sea-level the air is thinner and cleaner than down in the capital. Winters bite – frost whitens the vines until mid-morning – while July and August can hit 38 °C. Come in late April and the countryside is soft green; by mid-October the leaves flare copper before dropping to reveal rows of gnarled trunks that look like arthritic fists.

A Plaza That Works for a Living

Spanish guidebooks call it Plaza Mayor, locals simply "la plaza". Either way, the rectangle of honey-coloured stone is no museum piece. Waiters bang through the swing doors of Café Central carrying cortados to metal tables, grandmothers park shopping trolleys beside 500-year-old wooden columns, and the town band rehearses under the arcade on Thursday nights, trumpets ricocheting off stone. Arrive just after 11 a.m. on a weekday and you can claim a table, watch the morning lottery punters drift in, and still hear the change clatter in the waiter's leather pouch.

The church of Santa María faces the square like a stern headmistress. Begun in the 14th century, patched up after a fire in 1520, she keeps her original Mudéjar brickwork at the base and a Gothic doorway crowded with stone ivy and half-erased saints. Inside, the air smells of candle wax and distant incense; climb the narrow spiral (€2, ask the sacristan) for a view over terracotta roofs to the cereal plains beyond.

Underground Madrid

Beneath the streets runs a second town: five kilometres of hand-hewn galleries originally quarried for building stone, later reused as wine cellars. The rock is soft Miocene limestone – easy to dig, impossible to keep dry – so the walls sweat and the clay floor sucks at your shoes. Bodegas Figueroa opens 45-minute tours (€8 including three wines; book 24 h ahead, English spoken). You'll see a 16th-century press carved from a single trunk of holm oak and a chimney that once vented a blacksmith's forge; when phylloxera wiped out the vines in 1902 the townspeople simply switched to shoe-making down here. The temperature stays a constant 14 °C year-round – bring a jumper even in August.

If the guide's free, ask him to unlock the little Ulpiano Checa museum on Calle de la Iglesia. Checa was the local boy who painted Parisian horse races and Roman chariot crashes for the illustrated papers before dying of TB at 42. The single upstairs room holds his oil sketches: loose, fast, surprisingly modern. British visitors usually mutter "why haven't we heard of him?" and the guardian shrugs – exactly the reaction that makes the place worth ten minutes.

What to Eat When You're Not Drinking

Lunch starts early. By 13:30 the asadores are already pouring rendered lamb fat over quartered potatoes. Order carne al desarreglo at La Manchega on Calle Nueva and you get beef that's been simmered in tomato and local garnacha until it collapses into fibres, milder than most Spanish stews and close enough to Mum's cottage pie to comfort homesick teenagers. Vegetarians can fall back on patatas chulas – hand-cut crisps tossed in sweet-smoked paprika and enough garlic to keep Dracula in Madrid.

Cheese comes from Queso Ciriaco's shop behind the plaza: a six-month sheep's milk wheel, nutty rather than barnyard-funky, excellent with the town's young white. If you're assembling a picnic, the Sunday morning market (08:00–14:00) spills across the square: olives the size of walnuts, jars of honey from the neighbouring hills, and second-hand English paperbacks for €1 because half the town learned the language picking fruit in Kent during the 1960s.

Flat Walks and Steep Views

You don't need hiking boots. A 3-km green-way, the Vía Verde del Tajuña, follows the old railway bed south to the river – flat, tarmacked, push-chair friendly. Cyclists can rent bikes from the petrol station on the M-404 (€15 half-day) and coast through tunnels of reeds while kingfishers flash turquoise overhead.

For something stiffer, follow the signed path from Calle San Roque up to the Cerro de la Oliva. Twenty minutes of calf-stretching gravel delivers a 360-degree view: the vineyards immediately below, then the cereal steppe rippling away to the snow-capped Guadarrama. In May the slope is carpeted with yellow Spanish broom and the air smells of thyme and diesel from a distant tractor – rural Spain in one breath.

When Things Close (and They Will)

The siesta is non-negotiable. Shops shutter at 14:00 sharp; restaurants stop serving at 16:00 and won't reopen until 20:30 at the earliest. Monday is dead – the museum, most bodegas and even the parish office stay shut. Turn up then and you'll have the plaza to yourself, but little else.

Public transport obeys similar caprice. The 337 runs hourly from Madrid most days, but the 19:00 departure is often full by Villaciosa; buy your return ticket early or you may find yourself stranded until 21:30. By car it's 40 minutes on the A-3, exit 26, then country road – narrow but not white-knuckle. Park on the southern approach (free) and walk uphill; the old centre's lanes are barely one car wide and locals have little patience for three-point turns.

Combine, Don't Overstay

Three hours covers the essentials: plaza, church, one bodega, coffee and a spin round the ceramics shop where Juanjo still throws clay on a wheel his grandfather built from a sewing-machine treadle. Stay for lunch and an afternoon walk, then catch the 16:00 bus back to Madrid in time for tapas in La Latina. Colmenar doesn't do nightlife – once the last café closes at 23:00 the only sound is the church bell counting the hour and, somewhere below, wine breathing quietly in the dark.