You open the balcony door and the oaks are right there.

The place

Molinos de Duero, between the pine forest and the river

Molinos sits at 1,095 metres, at the foot of the Urbión peaks, on the banks of the Duero and five minutes from the Cuerda del Pozo reservoir, right in the middle of the province’s great blanket of pine forest. Just over 160 people live here. It has twice won the province’s Tourist Municipality award, and it shows as you walk around: it is one of the most stately-looking villages in the district.

That stateliness has a very concrete explanation: Molinos was a leading centre of the ox-cart haulage trade that moved goods across half of Castile. One figure from 1753 gives the measure of it: the village kept 2,617 oxen pulling 872 carts. That is where the fine ashlar houses you walk past came from, with their arched doorways, deep overhanging eaves, long wooden balconies, heavy ironwork at the windows, hallways wide enough to load and unload a cart, and the tall pinariega chimneys.

The same past gave the village the Real Posada de la Mesta, so representative of Soria’s architecture that it was reproduced in Barcelona’s Pueblo Español. The church of San Martín de Tours is Gothic with a Greek-cross plan: there is only one other like it in the province, at Montenegro de Cameros. The town hall occupies the old 1789 granary, with the patron saint carved on horseback above the door, and it stands on your own street, a few numbers down. The three restaurants are all less than 300 metres from the front door. And if you fancy a walk without leaving the pine wood, ask about the Fuente de los Navaritos — everyone here calls it the Fuente del Cojo.