Velliza

A Plateau Above the Plains

Stand at the edge of Velliza and your eyeballs reset to a new horizon. The village perches on the Torozos ridge 790 metres up, high enough for the Meseta to drop away like a forgotten map. Stone houses finish abruptly; fields begin. No gentle transition, just a doorstep between home and nowhere. On clear days the view runs thirty kilometres until heat shimmer eats the furthest tractors. At night the same line becomes a scatter of orange pinpricks: Valladolid, Tordesillas, the odd lorry crawling the A-62.

This is Castile stripped to its working clothes. Adobe walls the colour of dry biscuits carry thin sills of granite. Timbering is raw, never painted. Roofs angle just enough to let rain sprint off; ridge-tiles carry the same straw-coloured lichen you see on the surrounding earth. Nothing is decorative, everything answers weather. The wind arrives unfiltered from the Atlantic, whistles across cereal stubble, then punches the village square. Locals meet it with hunched shoulders and brief greetings. Silence reasserts itself within seconds.

What Passes for a Centre

The parish tower doubles as navigational aid. Built from whatever stone the hillside yielded, it rises barely twenty metres yet dominates because nothing else dares compete. Close-up you notice the brick repairs: Victorian-ish in their orange precision, twentieth-century in their hurry. The nave behind is locked most days; ring the house opposite with the green door and someone’s aunt will fetch the key, wiping flour from her hands. Inside smells of candle wax and stone dust; the single aisle takes forty paces, end to end. Murals are long gone, whitewashed during one of Spain’s periodic spasms of liturgical minimalism. What remains is proportion: the width exactly half the length, the height exactly half again. A farmer’s geometry, solved without blueprints.

Around the church the streets form a loose asterisk. One arm points to the graveyard where last year’s plastic flowers still fade. Another drops to the former school, its playground now a car park for residents who commute to Valladolid. A third simply stops at a field gate; beyond it the footpath continues as a tractor rut. Walking these lanes takes seven minutes if you resist reading the faded enamel adverts for extinct mineral water. Pause longer and you’ll notice the eaves: terracotta troughs channel winter rain into galvanised tanks. Every roof harvests its own weather.

Walking the Sky’s Edge

Maps call the surrounding terrain “paramo” – moorland without the peat. In spring the earth glows green so bright it feels backlit; by July it bleaches to biscuit, then silver. Paths follow field margins rather than Rights of Way signs. You share them with hares that sprint in zig-zags and tractors hauling grain to local co-ops. A circular trudge of eight kilometres south-east brings you to the edge of the Cigales valley where vineyards start. The gradient is gentle but cumulative; allow ninety minutes and carry more water than you think polite. Buzzards hang overhead, wings fingered like glove leather. If you’re lucky a Great Bustard will lift from stubble on the horizon, neck long as a shepherd’s crook, flight resembling a lorry struggling uphill.

Winter rewrites the deal. At 790 metres frost lingers until ten; the wind carries Atlantic sleet across two hundred kilometres of flatness. Roads ice quickly because gritters focus on the A-below-62. Chains are overkill, but hire cars with summer tyres will pirouette on the slightest camber. January days are crystalline, skies vacuumed blue, sunsets that smear the snowfields pink. Just don’t expect anywhere to buy a coffee when you get back.

Eating (Elsewhere)

Velliza itself has no restaurant, no shop, no bar. The last grocery closed the week the owner’s daughter got fibre-optic broadband and discovered Deliveroo. Plan accordingly. Ten minutes’ drive north, Matilla de los Caños offers Bar La Plaza where the menu del día runs to three courses, wine and coffee for €12. Lechazo – milk-fed lamb roasted in a wood oven – appears at weekends; order before 2 pm or it’s gone. Vegetarians get tortilla, salad and a sympathetic shrug. Locals eat at 3 pm sharp; arrive at 4 and the kitchen is mopping up.

Self-caterers should raid Valladolid’s Mercadona on the way out. Essentials: Serrano ends for bean stews, a slab of cured cheese from Villalón, and a bottle of Cigales rosado that costs less than London’s parking meters. Back in the village, Casa Rural Velliza provides a serviceable kitchen, but the nearest place to buy forgotten teabags is a 22-kilometre round trip. Bring your own milk; the UHT in village cupboards has seen dictators fall.

When the Village Returns to Itself

August fiesta turns the clock back thirty years. Descendants arrive from Madrid and Barcelona, squeeze into houses built for eight occupants now housing twenty. The church bell rings at noon, not for prayer but to announce the foam party in the polideportivo – essentially a livestock enclosure hosed down and fitted with speakers. Evenings mean bingo in the square, numbers called by a teenager whose Valladolid accent is thick with metropolitan confidence. At 2 am fireworks crack above the silos; dogs vanish under beds. For forty-eight hours Velliza feels populous. Then Seat Leóns and Dacias grind away, leaving tyre tracks across the silence.

Out of season the social hub relocates to the next bar along the ridge road, open Thursday to Sunday “if the owner wakes up”. Inside, walls display photos of the 1959 threshing machine and a signed shirt from when Valladolid reached the Copa del Rey semi-final. Coffee is Nescafé Classico; beer is Cruzcampo served in tiny glasses whose foam survives exactly three sips. Conversation covers rainfall, wheat futures, and whether the new windfarm will pay more than the old barley subsidy. English is understood if you speak slowly and accept replies in Gallego-accented Spanish. Buy a round and you’re local until closing – usually 10 pm, dictated by the television schedule rather than licensing laws.

How to Get Here, How to Leave

Valladolid airport sees Ryanair from Stansted twice weekly in summer; outside those months Madrid is the only realistic gateway. Pick up a hire car at Barajas T4, swing north on the A-6 then the A-62 for 167 kilometres. Leave at junction 109, follow signs for Matilla de los Caños, then brown signs for “Velliza” that appear only after you’ve almost missed the turn. The last 12 kilometres narrow to single-track with passing places; meet a combine harvester and someone reverses 200 metres. Sat-navs panic and direct you across farm tracks – ignore them, stay on tarmac.

Petrol before you leave the motorway; the village pump closed in 2004. Phone signal drifts between 4G and “SOS only” depending on cloud cover; download offline maps. When you depart, the same road feels shorter – familiarity, or relief that the car’s clutch survived the hills. Either way, the Meseta opens behind like a book slammed shut. In the mirror Velliza’s tower shrinks to a pin, then nothing. The plateau keeps its own counsel until next time, or until the wheat turns gold again.