Fuente De San Esteban La

The 07:43 freight to Portugal still rattles past the level crossing at the edge of Fuente de San Esteban each morning, scattering pigeons from the brick water tower that hasn’t filled a steam boiler since 1987. Nobody on the platform bothers to look up; they are busy slapping churros dough into the fryer at the station café, where the coffee costs €1.20 if you stand at the bar and the radio plays local cattle prices. This is not a film set—just a Castilian village that happened to grow up where the plough-land runs out and the dehesa oak pasture begins, exactly half-way between Salamanca and the border.

Seventy kilometres west of the university city, the A-62 motorway spits you onto the N-620, and after ten minutes of wheat-scented aircon you swing left onto the CL-517. Fuente appears without warning: low brick houses, a single traffic light, and a plaza mayor the size of a provincial British car park. Park anywhere; the white lines are suggestions and the town hall doesn’t own a traffic warden. The only paid space in town is the metre beside the health centre—20 cents an hour, coins only, which tells you most of what you need to know about municipal ambition here.

Stone, Brick and the Smell of Pig Feed

Parish churches in rural Salamanca are graded on sobriety, and San Esteban’s achieves a solid upper-second. Built between 1563 and 1601, it is one nave, one bell tower, zero frills. Push the south door (it sticks in July, swells in January) and the air drops five degrees; your eyes adjust to the ochre glow of stone that has absorbed four centuries of frankincense and harvest dust. The retablo is gilded but not lurid; the single baroque flourish is a 1635 altarpiece paid for by a local wheat baron whose coat of arms—two sheaves and a railway wheel added in 1924—still hangs like an afterthought above the sacristy door.

Round the corner, Calle de San Francisco keeps a run of houses whose wooden balconies are wide enough to store a year’s worth of garlic. One doorway is carved with the date 1789 and the instruction “Passant, fes oració” in fading Catalan script—nobody knows why. Across the road, a 1970s bakery has bricked up its horse entrance but left the iron pulley; the owner will sell you a 400-gram loaf for €0.85 if you arrive before ten, after which the dough is finished and she closes for the daily siesta that nobody has bothered to rename.

Trains that Only Run on Sundays

Fuente’s station lost its regular passenger service in 1985 when the metre-gauge line to Portugal was closed. The tracks remained, however, and a volunteers’ association now runs 28-kilometre steam excursions every Sunday from April to October. Tickets (€18 adult, €8 child) must be booked online in English at www.caminodehierro.es; the website looks Soviet but it works. Board at 10:30, sit on reversible 1950s seats, and watch the driver shovel coal while the guard sells €1 cans of beer through the window. The train crawls south through holm-oak pasture to the Duero gorge, pausing at a riverside picnic site where an enterprising family from Birmingham once tried to order a full English. They got jamón bocadillos instead, and the story is still told in the bar car.

If you prefer wheels you can pedal yourself, the village tourist office—one desk inside the library, opens Tuesday and Thursday—hands out a free PDF of a 45-km loop that links Fuente with Villarino de los Aires and back. The roads are empty, the surface patched, and the gradients gentle enough for hybrids. Take water; the only fountain is at 22 km beside a cemetery where the gate is chained to keep cattle out.

Eating Without the Performance

Restaurants number exactly five, and three of them will be shut on any given Monday. The safest bet is Restaurante Vegallana on Calle del Medio, where the menu del día is €12 and the house red arrives in a plain glass bottle that once held supermarket olive oil. Order the lechazo—milk-fed lamb roasted in a wood oven whose smell drifts onto the street at 13:00 sharp. Half raciones are available; ask for “media ración” and you’ll receive two ribs, chips and a lettuce heart dressed with salt and vinegar. Vegetarians get a plate of judiones (giant butter beans) stewed with tomato and smoked paprika; it is filling enough to power an afternoon of train-spotting.

Sunday lunchtime belongs to Casa de Juanjo on the plaza. Arrive before 14:00 or queue with extended families who treat the place like their dining room. The plato combinado—grilled pork chop, fried egg, chips, green pepper—costs €9 and comes with a basket of bread you are supposed to pay for (€1) even though nobody asks. Pudding is flan or flan; order coffee and they bring a miniature custard tart on the house, a habit learned from Portuguese coach drivers who stop on the Madrid–Porto run.

August Fireworks and Winter Smoke

Fiestas start on 25 July, Santiago Day, and last five nights. The population triples, the chemist sells out of sunscreen, and the single cash machine beside the BBVA emits its last €20 note on the Saturday. Book accommodation early or stay in Salamanca and drive in after 18:00 when the police close the through-road for the running-egg race—children carrying spoons full of olive oil down the high street, chaos guaranteed. Midnight brings a firework display launched from the railway embankment; sparks land on parked cars and nobody minds.

Winter is quieter. January mornings smell of wood smoke and pig farms; the temperature can touch –8 °C, so bring a coat that you don’t mind smelling of chorizo the next day. This is matanza season: families slaughter one pig and spend three days turning it into salchichón, morcilla and lard. Some houses will let you watch if you ask politely in Spanish; expect to be offered a slice of fresh ear and a glass of anis. Vegetarians should politely decline and blame the doctor.

How to Get Here, Where to Sleep, When to Leave

The nearest airport is Valladolid, served by Ryanair from London Stansted on Tuesdays and Saturdays in summer. Hire a car, ignore the sat-nav’s attempt to send you down a farm track, and aim for the A-62 west. Total driving time is 1 hour 40 minutes, motorway almost door-to-door. Trains from Madrid Chamartín reach Salamanca in 1 h 40 min; onward buses to Fuente run twice daily except Sunday, but they are timed for schoolchildren and shoppers, not tourists. A taxi from Salamanca costs €80—more than the weekend hire car.

Accommodation is thin. Hotel Avenida has 18 rooms opposite the health centre, doubles €55 with breakfast (instant coffee, industrial pastry, freshly squeezed orange juice if the machine is working). The place is clean, the Wi-Fi reaches room 12, and the owner keeps the front door open all night because he lost the key. There is also a three-room guesthouse above the bakery; sheets smell of yeast and the bell tower chimes every quarter hour. Check-out is 11:00 sharp—no exceptions, the cleaner has chickens to feed.

Leave before noon in summer and the wheat fields shimmer like the North Sea. Stay longer and you risk being invited to a family asado, which begins at 14:30 and ends when the last uncle remembers he left the tractor running. Fuente de San Esteban will never make the front of a glossy guidebook, but that is precisely why the bread is fresh, the train still runs, and the plaza mayor belongs to pigeons and retired agronomists rather than selfie sticks. Come for the steam engine, stay for the lamb, and leave before you start correcting the Spanish subtitles on the television in the bar.