Reinoso de Cerrato

At 730 m above the Duero basin, Reinoso de Cerrato is high enough for the air to feel rinsed, yet low enough for the horizon to bend like a loose wire. Fifty residents, one church tower and a circumference you can walk in twelve minutes: this is a place that measures time in cereal colours—April’s lime-green, July’s brass, October’s stubble-grey. The only traffic jam is when two neighbours stop to discuss rainfall figures through their 4×4 windows.

British drivers usually arrive after the Santander ferry, 140 km to the north. The last half-hour from the A-67 is single-carriageway, then a ruler-straight county road that signs itself “CL-635” and feels like an experiment in perspective. Google Maps will swear you have arrived while the village is still a smudge on the ridge; patience, the smudge grows into adobe walls the colour of digestive biscuits and a cluster of galvanised roofs that ping in the sun.

What passes for a centre

There is no plaza mayor, just a widening where the church throws shade at siesta time. The Iglesia de San Andrés is 16th-century, Romanesque shoulders grafted onto a later tower; the stone has gone silver from wind-blown wheat chaff. The door is normally locked—Mass is advertised for “domingo, 11 h, si hay cura” (Sunday, 11 a.m., if we have a priest). Circle the building and you will spot the war wounds: a patched wall where the 1936 fire licked out, and grooves meant for scaffolding that never came down because the money ran out. No ticket office, no audio guide, just the smell of hot thyme from the roof ridge.

Houses follow the same grammar: metre-thick tapial, wooden gates you could drive sheep through, and a pigeon loft on the upper gable that still rattles at dusk. Roughly every third dwelling is a ruin; swallows nest in the beam sockets, and the owners—grandchildren in Valladolid—visit once a year to check the roof hasn’t finally given in. Walk softly: locals leave doors ajar so the draught keeps the wine cellar cool, and interrupting a nap is the fastest way to be marked as the travelling equivalent of a tax inspector.

Walking without waymarks

Reinoso is the unofficial mile-zero of the Ruta de las Rs, a 9 km loop that links five almost-empty villages beginning with R. The track is a farm road graded for combine harvesters, so stout trainers suffice; poles feel pretentious. You will share the surface with the occasional John Deere and, in June, millions of grasshoppers that click like faulty bicycle hubs. The reward is the view south across the Cerrato: a swell of barley that looks, from the crest, like a yellow sea frozen mid-swell. Binoculars help pick out the stone heap of a ruined celada—an old sheep barn—then the silver thread of the Carrión river 10 km away. There are no cafés en route; carry water, and expect the only toilet to be whatever oak tree hasn’t been cropped into a hedge.

Cyclists like the gradient (or absence of it). A 30 km out-and-back to Husillos gives you straight Roman causeway, a level-crossing where the Valladolid–Palencia train whooshes past every two hours, and the smell of liquorice from a distant aniseed factory. Mountain-bike tyres are overkill; anything that can cope with the towpath along the Thames will manage here.

Supplies, or the lack of them

The village shop closed the year the euro arrived. The nearest bread is 12 km away in Palencia’s Mercadona, so self-cater or timetable lunch in the county capital. If you must eat locally, the Bar Cristina in neighbouring Torquemada does a three-course menú del día with wine for €12; roasted suckling lamb appears on Saturdays, chewy enough to test British dental work. Vegetarians should lean on tortilla and the local PDO cheese, queso de oveja: oily, slightly piquant, and willing to survive a warm afternoon in a rucksack.

There is no pub, but the groundwater is famously hard with calcium; ask at number 17 and Señorito Manolo will fill your bottle from the well. He will also tell you, unprompted, that the water is “más sana que la botella” (healthier than bottled), then demonstrate by watering his geraniums with it.

When to bother coming

April–May and September–October give you 22 °C at midday, 8 °C at dawn, and skies wiped clean by Atlantic fronts. July is furnace-hot—35 °C by 11 a.m.—and August belongs to the cereal harvest: dust, combine noise and the sweet itch of chaff in every crevice. Winter is bright but sharp; night frosts can dip to –8 °C, and the Airbnb casas keep their heating off until you message the owner on WhatsApp. Snow is rare, yet when it lands the CL-635 is treated late, so carry chains if you book February half-term on a whim.

Festivals follow the agricultural clock. The fiesta patronal drifts between the last weekend of July and the first of August, depending on when the harvest ends. Events revolve around a portable bull-ring the size of a tennis court, erected in the school playground; tickets are €5, sold from a kitchen window. Brits who balk at animal sports will still appreciate the Saturday night street disco where a single neon arch throws 1980s hits across the grain silos until 3 a.m.—ear-plugs recommended because the hills bounce the bass like a dub remix.

Where to sleep (and why you might not)

Inside the village, Airbnb lists three stone cottages, all with wood-burners, variable Wi-Fi and 5-star cleanliness ratings born of low sample size. Expect €70 a night for two bedrooms, no pool, and a neighbour who practices trumpet at 7 p.m. Camping Riberduero on the Carrión river (20 min drive) has 90 grassy pitches, a small pool and a bar that shows La Liga; hard-standing costs €24 incl. electricity, handy if you have driven over in a Swift or a VW California. Wild campers use the Park4Night spot 2 km north beside the seasonal stream—flat, litter-free, zero facilities. The Guardia Civil patrol occasionally; keep registration papers handy and depart by 9 a.m. to avoid a €100 “infracción leve”.

Honest verdict

Reinoso will not change your life. It offers no souvenir shops, Michelin plates or selfie backdrops likely to break double-figure likes. What it does provide is a ready-made antidote to the Costas: a place where the loudest noise at 10 p.m. is the church bell counting the hour you had already guessed. Come if you need to calibrate your sense of scale—human small, sky enormous—and if you are content to trade entertainment for breathing space. Bring groceries, a Spanish phrasebook and a tolerance for silence; otherwise, keep driving south until someone offers you a cocktail umbrella.