Most of the water that Cartagena drinks was once rain on the mountains of the Sierra del Segura. The Taibilla river rises in the high country near Nerpio, and a long chain of canals, tunnels and aqueducts carries it, through a public body created in the 1920s, to taps across Murcia and parts of Alicante and Albacete. It is a good thing to know when you stand beside the dry streambeds of Fuente Serrano, seven kilometres from Nerpio, where the springs seem to have a purpose beyond the paintings in the rock.
The shelter lies in the broken uplands to the south-east of the village, in country of pine, juniper and cereal fields, where the road narrows and the traffic disappears. The riding is quiet and comfortable, with bends that curve gently across the plateau and a surface that is mostly good, though rough in patches. At this altitude, about a thousand metres, the nights stay cool in July and the winters are cold, so check the forecast between November and March.
The rock art around Nerpio is one of the largest concentrations in Albacete, with Levantine and schematic paintings grouped near springs and watercourses. That pattern, with art close to water, suggests that these shelters were used by people who lived in these hills for part of the year and knew where the springs were. It is a pleasing thought when you are standing next to a spring.
Nerpio is a village of fewer than seventeen hundred people, and fuel is not guaranteed, so fill up in Yeste, twenty-five kilometres away, or in Moratalla. There are bars in the village and a handful of places to stay. Take water for the walk, and be careful on the tracks, which can be muddy after rain.
The scale of the country is what stays with you. From the high ground you look across a patchwork of pine woods, bare ridges and small cultivated hollows, with hardly a roof in sight, and you realise that this is what most of inland Spain looked like for most of its history. A rider who stops the engine and listens will hear sheep bells, a distant tractor, and maybe the wind in the pines, and that is all. It is a good place to eat a bocadillo slowly.