Santiuste de San Juan Bautista

The combine harvester appears first as a red dot on the horizon, then grows into a rumbling insect that takes twenty minutes to reach the village edge. When it finally passes, the driver lifts one hand from the wheel in greeting—about as much ceremony as Santiuste de San Juan Bautista cares to muster on an August afternoon.

At 818 metres above sea level, the village sits high enough for the air to thin slightly, but not high enough to excuse the 38-degree heat that settles over the Campiña Segoviana each summer. The cereal plateau stretches flat in every direction, broken only by the occasional holm oak and the terracotta roofline of the next settlement ten kilometres away. This is Castile's agricultural engine room: wheat, barley and sunflowers rotating through the calendar with the reliability of a station clock.

The Church That Refused to Stay Still

San Juan Bautista parish church anchors the western edge of the single-plaza centre. Built piecemeal between the 12th and 18th centuries, it wears its architectural indecision openly—Romanesque base, Mudéjar brickwork, Baroque tower tacked on like an afterthought. The interior is refreshingly spare: no gilded excess, just thick stone walls that keep the temperature ten degrees cooler than outside. Sunday mass still draws thirty-odd villagers, though numbers swell to eighty during the June fiestas when the statue of St John is carried clockwise round the square three times, just slowly enough for the bearers to rest their shoulders.

Ring the sacristan's bell if you want to climb the tower. Juan Carlos—retired farmer, part-time custodian—will appear eventually, wiping flour from his hands if his wife was mid-bake. The €2 donation goes towards roof repairs; the view reveals the full geometry of cereal plots that define this landscape. Bring binoculars: stone curlews feed in the fallow strips, and you'll spot the difference between wheat stubble and barley stubble once someone points it out.

Walking Without a Destination

Proper footpaths don't really exist here. Instead, the village is stitched to its fields by a lattice of agricultural tracks—hard-packed earth wide enough for a tractor, marked occasionally with concrete kilometre posts that list farm names rather than destinations. Pick one and start walking. Within fifteen minutes the settlement shrinks to a smudge, and the only sounds are wind rasping through dried thistles and the distant clank of a cultivator.

Spring brings the best walking: green wheat carpets the plain, poppies splatter verges red, and temperatures hover in the low twenties. Autumn works too, though dust replaces pollen and the sun sits lower, sharpening shadows across the stubble. Summer is doable only before 10 a.m.; after that the mirage shimmers begin and every piece of metal reaches frying temperature. Winter is brief but sharp—night frosts, daytime highs of 8 degrees, and the possibility of being snowed in for a day or two if the northeasterly gets ambitious.

Carry water. The nearest bar is back in the village, and the only shade between here and the horizon is whatever hat you're wearing.

What Passes for Gastronomy

Santiuste doesn't do restaurants. It does private kitchens where grandmothers fire up wood ovens on feast days, and where the annual pig slaughter still dictates the winter protein calendar. Visitors relying on public dining should adjust expectations accordingly: the single café opens at 7 a.m. for farmers' breakfasts—coffee, cognac and tortilla the size of a cartwheel—then shuts when the last customer leaves, usually before noon.

The workaround is to phone ahead. Three households are licensed to serve food to outsiders, though they'll only cook if warned the previous day. Expect cordero lechal (milk-fed lamb) roasted until the bones separate like puzzle pieces, plus judiones (giant white beans) stewed with morcilla. Price hovers around €18 a head, wine included. Vegetarians receive an omelette and sympathy; vegans should probably drive to Segovia.

Buy bread from the van that tours surrounding villages on Tuesday and Friday mornings. The driver honks twice; residents emerge with cloth bags and the latest gossip. Whole loaves cost €1.40, sliced on request using a machine bolted to the van floor.

Getting Here, Staying Put

Public transport reaches the Campiña only in the most theoretical sense. One bus leaves Segovia at 2 p.m., reaches Santiuste at 3.15 p.m., and returns at 6 a.m. the following day. Miss it and you're walking 26 km along the N-110, not recommended in August or during the October deer-hunt season.

Driving makes more sense. From Madrid take the A-6 to Villacastín, then the CL-601 north for 18 minutes. The final turn-off appears suddenly after a crest; if you reach the wind turbines you've overshot. Parking is wherever the verge is widest; the Guardia Civil only object if you block a gateway during harvest.

Accommodation is limited to three village houses renovated as rural lets. Two sleep four, one sleeps eight; prices run €80–€120 per night with a two-night minimum. Booking is direct—no credit-card machines, no online calendars. Send an email in Spanish (English replies arrive via Google Translate) and wait up to a week for confirmation. The houses come with fireplaces, star-view skylights and kitchens equipped for serious cooking. Mobile signal is patchy; Wi-Fi exists but achieves roughly 1998 speeds. Bring cash for the honesty box that covers firewood.

The Calendar That Still Matters

Agricultural rhythm trumps tourism seasonality here. Visit during sowing (November) and you'll smell diesel and freshly turned earth. Come back for harvest (July) and the air fills with chaff dust that settles on laundry and car windscreens alike. The June fiestas—24th to 26th—coincide with the shortest nights, so fireworks start at midnight and the brass band keeps going until the sun warns them to stop. Accommodation is booked six months ahead by returning emigrants; everyone else sleeps in their cars.

August is dead time. The threshing machines drone, the bar opens sporadically, and the only relief is the municipal swimming pool filled from the borehole—cold enough to make a Yorkshireman whimper. October brings the olive-grey arrival of winter migrants: skylarks in their thousands, hen harriers quartering the set-aside. Stand at the cemetery gate at dusk and you can watch the procession shift overhead, a rehearsal for the colder months to come.

Leave Santiuste when the weather turns, or when the silence starts to feel like pressure rather than release. Either way, the harvester will still be there next year, crawling across the same golden grid, and the driver will lift the same single hand in greeting—proof that some corners of Spain prefer to keep their drama in the soil, not on the skyline.