Collazos de Boedo

At 920 metres above sea level, Collazos de Boedo sits high enough for the air to carry a noticeable snap, even when Palencia’s plain below is sweating through July. The village church bell strikes noon and the sound rolls across wheat stubble that fades from gold to parchment under a sky the colour of well-washed denim. From the tiny mirador beside the slate-roofed houses you can watch combine harvesters crawling like orange beetles across a canvas the size of Bedfordshire. This is not a beauty spot polished for passing trade; it is simply where the meseta remembers it has edges, and the first foothills of the Cantabrian range begin to muscle upwards.

Stone, Slate and Silence

A hundred residents, perhaps fewer once the swallows depart, live in a tight knot of lanes barely two metres wide. Walls are built from caramel-coloured stone quarried a kilometre away; roofs wear heavy slabs of slate that have replaced the old Roman tiles one winter at a time. Adobe survives in places, though chunks fall away after hard frosts to reveal medieval rubble and the odd cigarette packet from 1987. One house boasts a stone lintel carved with the date 1642; next door breeze blocks prop up a garage door. The effect is neither ruin-porn nor chocolate-box, just the honest patchwork of a place that has never had money to fake itself.

There is no ticket office, no interpretation centre, no bilingual leaflets. The parish church of San Andrés keeps its own hours: if the oak door gives when you push, you may enter. Inside, the air smells of candle wax and damp sandstone. A single nave, a crude Christ in painted pine, a Romanesque font rescued from a collapsed chapel up the hill. Light falls through windows the size of tea towels and lands on pews polished by five centuries of Sunday coats. Donations for roof repairs are collected in an old jam jar; €2 coins are welcome, sterling accepted at your own risk.

Walking Without Waymarks

Collazos makes a natural hub for half-day walks that require no permit, no parking fee and virtually no navigation beyond “keep the cereal on your left, the skyline on your right”. A farm track heading north-east drops into the valley of the Boedo river, a shallow chalk stream that dries to a chain of emerald pools by August. Follow the track for ninety minutes and you reach Villaeles de Valdavia, a hamlet even smaller than Collazos where the bar opens on Saturday evenings only. Round trip: 8 km, 150 m of ascent, zero gift shops.

Spring brings a haze of green wheat and the clatter of skylarks; October turns the stubble fields the colour of burnt toast and fills the hedges with sloes that make a decent stand-in for damson gin. Kestrels hover above the verges, red-legged partridge explode from ditches like feathered fire-crackers, and if you start early enough you may see a wild boar family trotting home after a night raid on the maize. Mobile signal fades within five minutes of the last house; download your map before leaving the tarmac.

What to Eat and Where to Sleep

The village itself offers no restaurant, no shop, no cash machine. The nearest supermarket is a 15-minute drive away in Guardo, a mining town that also has the closest petrol station and chemist. Collazos does, however, possess one casa rural – El Pajar – converted from a hay barn and listed on Airbnb. Beamed ceilings, wood-burning stove, a kitchen drawer containing four mismatched steak knives and a bottle-opener shaped like a bull. £65 a night mid-week, two-night minimum at weekends. Bring coffee, olive oil and toilet paper; the host leaves fresh eggs from the hens that scratch about outside the window.

For meals you cook yourself, stock up in Guardo: ripe Valdeón blue cheese (ask for semicurado if you prefer it less aggressive than Stilton), a slab of cecina (air-cured beef, milder than bresaola), and a bottle of Bierzo red that tastes like Rioja after a year in the gym. If you want someone else to wash up, drive 20 minutes to Cervera de Pisuerga where Casa Mónica serves roast suckling lamb at €22 a portion, enough for two if you order starters.

When the Village Throws a Party

Collazos wakes up precisely twice a year. On the third weekend in August the fiesta of San Roque brings a procession, a bagpipe band and a foam machine that turns the tiny plaza into a kiddie disco until two in the morning. Visitors are welcome, parking is wherever you can squeeze a wheel without blocking a tractor. The other date is 30 November, when neighbouring villages haul chestnut-laden carts to the church square for the Magosto: free roasted nuts, rough red wine poured from enamel jugs, and an elderly man who remembers three phrases of English learned during his National Service in Gibraltar, 1954. Turn up on any other day and the biggest excitement is the bread van honking its horn at eleven.

Getting There, Getting Out

Ryanair’s morning flight from Stansted to Santander lands at 11:40; by 13:30 you can be on the A-67 heading south. From the motorway Collazos is 75 km of empty dual carriageway followed by 12 km of country road that narrows to a single lane between wheat. In winter the last climb can ice over; carry chains December to February. Trains from Madrid reach Palencia in two hours, but without a car you are stranded: the daily bus from Palencia to Guardo connects with nothing on weekends, and a taxi for the final stretch costs €35 each way.

The Catch

This is not a place for tick-list tourism. If it rains, you will get muddy and bored. If the wind blows from the north, the temperature drops five degrees in ten minutes. Night skies are spectacular but street lighting is token; bring a torch. Wi-Fi in El Pajar manages emails if no one else is online, but struggles with Netflix. Most of all, Collazos offers no curated “authenticity” – merely the real thing, with all the silences, inconveniences and small generosities that entails.

Drive away at dawn and the village shrinks in the rear-view mirror until only the church tower and a swirl of wood-smoke remain. You leave with the windows down, tasting cereal dust on your tongue, aware that somewhere between the stone walls and the skylark song you have briefly lived inside a geography textbook rather than just passed through it. Return visits are not compulsory; the place will carry on regardless, harvesting wheat, losing another roof tile, remembering you only if you left the jam jar a little heavier than you found it.