Pomar de Valdivia

The church bell strikes noon and the only other sound is a tractor straining up the PE-630. From the churchyard wall you can see the Pisuerga River glinting 200 metres below, framed by meadows where Braunvieh cattle graze among buttercups. This is Pomar de Valdivia, population 67, a village that feels as if someone forgot to add the twenty-first century.

At 1,100 metres the air is thinner than on the Cantabrian coast an hour away. Nights stay cool even in July, and the limestone cliffs to the north act like a natural air-con unit, funnelling Atlantic weather over the plateau. The result is a landscape that shifts hourly: one moment sunshine picks out the terracotta roof tiles; the next, a cloud drags its belly across the maize fields and the temperature drops five degrees. Bring layers, always.

Stone, Wood and the Smell of Wet Slate

Pomar’s houses are built from what lay to hand: grey-brown stone quarried from the same ridge that shelters the village. Walls are a metre thick, windows are small, and the oldest roofs still carry curved Arabic tiles that clang like crockery when the wind gets up. A handful of twentieth-century breeze-block garages intrude, but they don’t last long in photographs; the stone swallows them.

San Juan Bautista church stands at the top of the only paved lane. The doorway is pure Romanesque—round arch, zig-zag carving, the sort of thing you’d expect to find behind a pay-wall in a city museum—yet the building is unlocked from dawn to dusk. Inside, the nave smells of candle wax and damp sandstone. A laminated sheet in Spanish explains that the bell-tower was raised in the 1500s using stone robbed from a nearby Moorish outpost. No gift shop, no QR code, just a visitor book that last week included signatures from Leeds and Lerwick.

Below the church a short alley opens onto a balcony of wooden slats. From here you look straight down the Valdivia gorge. Griffon vultures wheel at eye level, their wings catching the up-draught where the cliff face warms in the sun. On a clear day you can trace the old wolf-traps—stone corrals where shepherds once baited predators—dotting the opposite slope like broken grey teeth.

Walking without Way-markers

Officially Pomar sits inside the UNESCO Las Loras Geopark, but don’t expect colour-coded arrows every 200 metres. The best walks start from the concrete trough at the village entrance: follow the cattle track west and you drop to the river in twenty minutes, passing a ruined water-mill where moss has overgrown the millstones. Turn east and the path climbs through holm oak to an abandoned hamlet called Viñayo, its stone bread oven still intact. Allow three hours for the round trip and carry water; the only fountain en route tastes strongly of iron.

Maps.me works if you download the region beforehand—mobile signal dies in every hollow. In spring the slopes are loud with skylarks; by October the same fields smell of wild thyme and gunmetal as hunting parties move through for boar and red-legged partridge. Wear something bright if you visit during the temporada de caza.

Winter brings its own rewards. After snow the road from Aguilar de Campoo is closed until the grader clears it, usually by ten o’clock. If you make it up, the village transforms: slate roofs white-over, the gorge silent except for the crack of ice falling from telephone wires. Snow chains are compulsory; the Guardia Civil turn cars back at the first bend if you haven’t got them.

What You’ll Eat and What You Won’t Find

There is no supermarket, no cash machine, no petrol station. The last bar closed when the owner retired in 2022, so self-catering is obligatory unless you’ve booked half-board at the only guesthouse. Fill the boot in Aguilar de Campoo—there’s a Carrefour Market on the bypass—and withdraw cash while you can.

What the village does grow is food with flavour. In the fields below the church a cooperative still cultivates the local alubia pinta bean, smaller than a cannellini and creamy enough to convert the most committed Heinz loyalist. Knock on the white house opposite the school at weekends and Marisol sells 500 g cloth bags for €3. She’ll also offer queso de Valdeón if her cousin has brought some over the pass from León; the blue veins are fierce, but a drizzle of local honey tames the salt.

Should you fancy eating out, the nearest proper restaurant is in Cordovilla de Valdivia, eight kilometres back towards the motorway. Asador El Cazador does a fixed-price lunch (€14, wine included) featuring sopa de almendras, a gentle almond broth that tastes like liquid marzipan, followed by roast lechazo—milk-fed lamb so tender it’s served with a spoon. Vegetarians get setas a la plancha, wild mushrooms the size of bread-and-butter plates. Book ahead at weekends; half of Santander seems to escape here when the beach wind gets tiresome.

Fiestas, Fire and the Fifteenth of September

The village’s biggest day is 14 September, Fiesta de Santa Cruz. By then the summer visitors have gone, so the place fills with returning grandchildren and former emigrants who fly into Santander from Luton for the weekend. A brass band marches up the lane at eleven, stops outside the church, and launches into a pasodoble that rattles the stained-glass. After Mass the women of the village serve cocido montañés from a cauldron borrowed from the fire brigade—white beans, cabbage and compango, a fatty slab of bacon that would make a British butcher blush.

At dusk everyone drifts to the ermita on the crag for the fire walk. The mayor lights a bonfire of spruce branches; when it collapses to embers the youngest carry a wooden cross through the coals. Outsiders are welcome to watch, cameras permitted, but don’t expect explanatory placards—this isn’t a re-enactment, it’s simply what happens here every year.

Leaving Without a Fridge Magnet

Pomar de Valdivia will not sell you a souvenir. There are no T-shirts, no shot glasses, not even a postcard. What it offers instead is a calibration of scale: cliffs older than mammals, a river that has cut its gorge by a millimetre a century, a village that survives because a handful of people still want to live where their grandparents did.

Drive away in the late afternoon and the limestone glows ochre in the lowering sun. Five minutes down the road you’ll meet the first lorry bound for Bilbao, and the twenty-first century rushes back in. Keep the window open; the north wind carries the smell of wet slate and wild thyme for miles.