Poza de la Vega

The grain lorry takes the bend at walking pace, dust rising like smoke behind it. From the cab the driver lifts two fingers in greeting – the only traffic you’ll meet for half an hour on the CL-615. At 930 m above sea level, Poza de la Vega sits high enough for the air to carry the smell of freshly-turned soil rather than diesel. One hundred and seventy registered souls, plus whoever has driven up from Palencia for the weekend, share six square kilometres of cereal steppe. The maths is simple: the plains always outnumber the people.

A horizon measured in wheat

The village name translates roughly as “pool of the flood-plain”, a reminder that water, not stone, once decided where people settled. There is no pool today, only a shallow seasonal stream that disappears into reed beds south of the houses. What remains is the vega – the wide, dark-soiled valley that unrolls westwards towards the neighbouring hamlet of Vega de Viejos, three kilometres away. In June the valley is a chessboard of greens: young wheat shimmering like bottle glass, then the duller olive of barley and, in the damper patches, a sudden slash of poppy red. By mid-July the colours have baked to biscuit and gold; harvesters work from dawn to beat the afternoon thermals that send dust devils spinning across the stubble.

You notice the silence first. No irrigation pumps, no motorway hum, only the high, flat note of a skylark that you can hear but rarely see. Walk five minutes past the last stone shed and the village acoustics vanish; even your boots sound different on the gritty tractor tracks. Mobile reception flickers in and out – handy if you want an excuse to ignore email, frustrating if you expected Google Maps to do the navigating.

Stone, adobe and the Sunday shutter

The centre is a single elongated square. One bar, closed on Tuesdays, doubles as the grocery. Bread arrives from a bakery in Saldaña at 10 a.m.; if the van is late, locals wait outside with canvas shopping bags rather than phone to complain. The seventeenth-century parish church of San Andrés keeps its tower door locked, but the sacristan lives opposite and will usually open up if you knock before lunchtime. Inside, the nave smells of candle wax and recently-limed walls; the only ostentation is a painted wooden Christ whose ivory teeth were added in the 1940s after the original plaster nose kept falling off.

House styles alternate between golden stone (quarried ten miles away in Boedo) and the region’s older mud-brick, here called tapial. Some façades carry carved family initials dating from the 1890s; others have concrete porches tacked on in the 1970s, now fading to mismatched greys. Half the properties are weekend retreats. Their owners arrive on Friday night, raise the shutters, water geraniums in tin cans, then lower everything again on Sunday evening. The effect is a streetscape that looks inhabited in summer and politely abandoned the rest of the year.

Walking tracks that pre-date the OS

There are no way-marked trails, yet the web of traditional drove roads, called cañadas, is etched into the plateau like ancient chalk lines. The most straightforward circuit heads north along the farm track signed “Los Barrancos”, dips into a shallow limestone gully where bee-eaters nest in May, then climbs back onto the plateau for a four-kilometre loop. Total ascent: 65 m. Difficulty: easier than finding a cash machine – the nearest is 18 km away in Saldaña. Take water; the only fountain is back in the village and July temperatures touch 34 °C.

Early risers are rewarded with roe deer silhouetted on the ridge and, if the overnight wind has scrubbed the sky, views of the Aguilar de Campoo wind farm 40 km to the north. The blades flicker like white needles on a dial, measuring weather you can feel minutes later when it rolls across the plain.

What you won’t find (and might miss)

Night-life means choosing between the two streetlights on the plaza or walking the lane until the motion-sensor lamp outside the carpenter’s workshop clicks on. Accommodation within Poza itself is zero; the closest legal beds are at La Posada de la Vega, three kilometres away in Vega de la Vega. The posada has eight rooms, a modest restaurant serving leek soup and roast lamb, and a TripAdvisor rating that hovers around three stars – perfectly adequate once you recalibrate expectations from boutique to “someone’s grandmother still fries the chips”. Price for a double in mid-season: €65, breakfast included. Book by phone; the online form mostly forwards to a defunct Hotmail account.

If you insist on staying in the village, the ayuntamiento will politely explain that rural zoning laws forbid paying guests inside residential houses. Wild camping is tolerated on the plateau provided you pack out rubbish and don’t light fires between June and October. A mid-September night under that sky is worth the lack of shower: Milky Way intensity is rated class 3 on the Bortle scale, dark enough to see the Andromeda Galaxy with averted vision.

Calendar governed by grain and bells

The fiestas patronales honour the Virgin of Valverde on the third weekend of August. The population quadruples; teenagers who left to study in Valladolid or Leeds return with rented sound systems and crates of Estrella Galicia. A foam machine turns the plaza into a makeshift disco until 3 a.m.; older residents retreat indoors to watch talent shows on TVE, volume turned high enough to drown the bass. By Monday lunchtime the rubbish lorry has come and gone, and the village resumes its default hush.

Semana Santa is the opposite spectacle: twenty people, one drum, a hooded procession that walks the single street twice and finishes inside the church before midday. Even the priest keeps it brief; everyone needs to get home for the stewpot.

Getting here, getting out

No train line, no bus, no Uber. From the UK the least painful route is a flight to Santander (daily from London in summer, twice-weekly off-season), pick up a hire car, and head south on the A-67 for 75 minutes. Valladolid airport is equidistant but involves more tolls. Either way, the final 30 km is on provincial roads where potholes reproduce faster than the wildlife. In winter the plateau ices over; carry snow chains if you’re visiting between December and February, and don’t trust the weather app that claims “light frost” – it means sheet ice by dusk.

Plain truths

Poza de la Vega will never feature on a “Top Ten Cute Villages” reel. Its attraction lies in what it refuses to offer: no craft-beer taproom, no gift shop selling cork placemats, no interpretive centre with an interactive plough. Instead you get space calibrated in wheat fields, time measured in church bells, and a horizon that stays stubbornly level whatever Instagram filter you apply. Bring walking boots, a litre of water and realistic expectations. If that sounds like enough, the village will be there – quiet, wind-scoured and exactly the same size as the silence you carry home.