Roman stadia and Muslim walls aside, they cover the landscape here in extraordinary profusion – witness, I assume, to Spain’s continuing rural depopulation:

Inside one of them was this skeletal remnant of a Citroen Diane:

We’ve only seen at a distance one entire abandoned village (or so it appeared to be, though there was smoke rising from somewhere). But there are supposedly quite a few in this area. And there’s a very clear economic distinction between some obviously poor, eerily almost-empty communities we passed through and those that, because of architecture or location, have managed to make something of a devil’s bargain with the money of tourists like us.

I wish I had the Spanish to engage people in real conversation about these issues, instead of getting it only roughly right when asking for directions.