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about Belmonte de Campos
Small municipality dominated by the silhouette of its medieval castle; it keeps the charm of the adobe villages of the plateau.
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Thirty souls, one church tower, zero traffic lights. Belmonte de Campos begins where the map turns beige, forty kilometres north-west of Palencia on a road so straight it feels like a drafting error. Pull off the N-610, kill the engine, and the only sound is the metal ticking itself cool. Wheat stubble stretches to every compass point; the sky is a dome you could bounce a coin off. This is not a “pretty” Spain of postcards. It is the stripped-back version, the one that survived by learning to live with emptiness.
Adobe and absence
The village grid is three streets wide and takes six minutes to walk. Houses are the colour of dry biscuits, their walls a metre thick to blunt the plateau’s temperature swings. Some doors still carry the owners’ names painted in 1950s serif; most are padlocked, awaiting descendants who visit only for the August fiesta. Peek through a loose shutter and you may see a parlour frozen mid-conversation: antimacassars on the chairs, a calendar open at July 1998, a tin of Spanish throat lozongs on the sideboard. Abandonment here is polite—nothing smashed, simply left to its own devices.
The castle, perched on a low limestone outcrop, is technically a castle-shaped dovecote. Access is by telephoning the mayor (983 720 396), who will cycle over with a key the size of a croquet hoop. Inside, the ground floor is a vaulted grain store; above, 300 nesting boxes perforate the walls like bullet holes. Climb the external stair for a 360-degree view: cereal sea, distant silos, the faint blue ripple of the Cantabrian Mountains that you will never reach today. There are no guard rails; the wind tastes of iron.
Walking the horizon
Belmonte sits at 740 m on Spain’s central plateau, a kilometre above the adjoining Canal de Castilla. The drop creates a natural balcony: morning walkers can watch fog sluicing along the tow-path while the village stays sunlit. A farm track leaves the last house, signposted only by the absence of wheat. Forty-five minutes out, the only vertical objects are stone dovecotes (palomares) built like miniature fortresses. Some still belong to individual families; others have trees growing through the roof. Bring binoculars: steppe birds—great bustards, little owls, hen harriers—use the structures as watchtowers. The land is so flat that a lark at knee height breaks the skyline.
Summer hikes begin at dawn and finish by ten; after that the thermometer races past 35 °C and the soil shimmers. In winter the same paths freeze hard; the same soil turns to axle-deep mud during the April rains. Spring and autumn are the civilised seasons, when the fields flick from emerald to gold overnight and the air smells of wet straw.
A menu you have to chase
There is no shop, no bar, no petrol. The last bakery closed when the oven roof fell in during 2003. Self-cater or drive twelve kilometres to Villarramiel for supplies. What you can taste, if you time it right, is the fiesta: on the weekend closest to 15 August the plaza fills with one long table. Tickets are sold from the mayor’s kitchen—€10 for clay-pot chickpeas with shoulder of lamb, followed by doughnuts in thyme honey. Locals donate the meat; the wine comes in five-litre plastic jugs marked simply “tinto”. Bring your own plate; washing-up is communal. When the band (two guitars, a trumpet and a laptop for percussion) packs up, the dancing continues under LED bulbs strung between balconies. By two o’clock the population has tripled, and someone will insist on practising English learned while picking strawberries in Kent.
Otherwise, eat before you arrive or be prepared to drive. The nearest restaurant worthy of the name is in Paredes de Nava, twenty minutes south: Asador Palentino does lechazo (milk-fed lamb) roasted in a wood-fired clay oven, €22 a quarter. They will also fill a litre bottle of local tempranillo for €4 if you ask before 9 p.m.; after that the barrel is empty.
How to get here, how to leave
Valladolid airport (VLL) receives Ryanair flights from London Stansted three times a week in summer; hire a car, point it north on the A-62, then slip onto the N-610. Total driving time: one hour fifteen, last forty minutes without seeing another headlight. Madrid is an alternative: AVE train to Valladolid (56 min) plus a 90-minute cross-country drive. Public transport stops at the bus depot in Palencia; from there a taxi will cost €70 and the driver will ask why you’re going.
Staying overnight means either the village house rented by the council (three bedrooms, €40 total, keys from the mayor) or a scattering of casas rurales in Villarramiel. Book nothing on Booking.com—ring 979 810 042 and speak slowly; mobile signal indoors is patchy and Wi-Fi belongs to the next province. Check-out time is whenever you hand the key back, which could be days later because no one is in a hurry.
The fine print
Come with water, sun-hat and a paper map; Google’s cartography shows a street that was ploughed up in 2011. Expect dogs asleep in the roadway—they will open one eye, decide you are harmless, close it again. Do not expect a souvenir; even the church’s single postcard ran out in 1998. Photographers should note that the castle faces due east: dawn gives golden stone and long shadows, midday gives none, dusk gives a silhouette against wheat-coloured sky.
Leave before you understand it too well. Belmonte de Campos works as a palate cleanser between cathedrals and cities, a place to remember how big the sky can feel when nothing competes for your attention. Drive away, and the silence folds back in like water behind a boat. Ten minutes later you’ll meet the first tractor; twenty, the first traffic lights. The plateau keeps its secrets by pretending it never had any.
