Tembleque to Mascaraque

This is one of the longest days of the Camino del Sureste in Manchegan lands: thirty-two kilometres of cereal plain and olive grove in which the gradient hardly counts, but the sun and the almost total absence of shade certainly do. It is wise to set off in the dark and carry plenty of water, because the stretches between villages are long and services are scarce.

Tembleque bids the pilgrim farewell with its Plaza Mayor, a seventeenth-century arcaded wooden quadrangle of two superimposed galleries, considered one of the most remarkable civil ensembles in La Mancha. The path heads north-west along farm tracks and enters a landscape of large plots, cut by irrigation channels and dotted with field huts, until reaching Villanueva de Bogas some thirteen kilometres on. It is the only reliable rest stop of the first half.

From Villanueva de Bogas the route continues towards Mora, and here the olive grove becomes absolute master of the terrain. Mora is the oil capital of the province of Toledo and holds its Olive Festival every spring; its mills and whitewashed manor houses announce a larger town with full services. Above the village, on a hill, stand the ruins of the castle of Peñas Negras, a watchtower that controlled the natural pass towards the Montes de Toledo.

The last stretch, some eight kilometres, leaves Mora along Calle Toledo and advances among farmland and an area of ceramic factories, crosses the railway line and enters Mascaraque along Calle Paloma. The village is small and quiet, with wide streets and low houses, and the hermitage of La Veracruz at its northern edge, exactly where the path will leave the following day. Mascaraque marks the border between the Manchegan plain and the district of La Sisla, the agricultural step that precedes Toledo.