Boada de Campos

The grain silo on the edge of Boada de Campos still works, even though the village head-count has dropped to sixteen. At 750 metres above sea level the metal creaks in the night wind, a noise loud enough to reach the single lit window on Calle Real. That is the first thing you notice after the engine goes off: metal contracting, a dog barking somewhere across the plain, then nothing. Absolute nothing stretches for forty kilometres in every direction.

This is Tierra de Campos, the “Land of Fields”, a plateau so flat that Roman surveyors never bothered with switchbacks. Boada sits near its geographical centre, 35 km south-west of Palencia, reachable only by car after the regional flight from London to Valladolid or the longer haul to Madrid. From either airport you follow the A-62, then smaller numbers that shrink with the traffic: CL-613, CL-615, finally a county lane whose tarmac stops ten metres before the village sign. There is no bus, no taxi rank, no bike-hire booth. If the hire-car clutch smells hot you have driven too fast; the last 12 km average one vehicle every twenty minutes, most of them combine harvesters.

A grid that forgot to grow

Boada was laid out in the twelfth century on a strict mud-brick grid: two parallel streets, three transversal alleys, a plaza the size of a tennis court. The church, dedicated to San Pedro, anchors the north-east corner; everything else has been folding in on itself ever since. Roughly half the houses are open to the sky. Their adobe walls—once the colour of digestive biscuits—have slumped into organic curves, windows sagging like tired eyes. Walk softly: the owners (or their children in Valladolid) still harvest the walnuts that fall through the roof beams every October.

The handful of inhabited homes are easy to spot: PVC doors, satellite dishes, geraniums in oil drums. One belongs to María, the unofficial chronicler, who sells tins of Coke from her front room on the honour system. Leave two euros on the windowsill; if you need change she will appear from the vegetable patch behind. Ask about the population graph and she unfolds a sheet of graph paper that her grandson printed: 350 in 1950, 86 in 1981, 31 in 2008, 16 today. “We’re not dying,” she says, “just diffusing.” She points to the sky, half joking: the storks have doubled in the same period.

Walking where the horizon tilts

You come here to walk, but the walking is peculiar. Without hills the eye invents gradients; after an hour the plain seems to rise in every direction and Boada feels like the bottom of a shallow saucer. A basic circuit is the sheep-drove south to the abandoned hamlet of Villamelendro (4 km). The track is a sandy two-rut flanked by wheat or barley depending on the rotation; in May the green is almost luminous, by July it has toasted to the colour of Weetabix. Take water—there is no shade and the breeze that feels cooling at first quietly dehydrates. If you prefer distance to narrative, strike east along the farm road towards Tabanera de Cerrato. After 7 km the cereal stops at a sudden drop: the Cerrato ridge, a 200-metre cliff that geologists blame on a prehistoric earthquake. Sit on the edge and the plain behind you becomes a map, the village a smudge that could be rubbed out with a thumb.

Spring brings birds that British reserves would queue for: great bustards flap overhead like lumbering B-52s, lesser kestrels hang above the church tower, and at dusk stone-curwels emit their curfew of whistles from the fallow strip behind the cemetery. Bring binoculars, but do not expect hides or information boards; the only infrastructure is a rusted sign warning that the fields are private. Stay on the unploughed margins and no one minds. Farmers wave from tractor cabs; they have seen too many city cars turn around after the first kilometre of dust.

Eating by elimination

There is no shop, bar, bakery, filling station, cashpoint or mobile coverage in Boada itself. The nearest coffee is 11 km away in Paredes de Nava, a market town whose main square hosts a Monday farmers’ stall selling leeks the size of cricket stumps. If you self-cater, stock up in Palencia before you leave; the Mercadona on Calle Esteban Collantes has a decent British aisle (Yorkshire Tea at €4.80, Heinz beans at €1.95). Locals recommend the roast suckling lamb at Asador Palencia in the city, but that is a forty-minute drive back, so the practical picnic is a bar of Palencia chocolate and a bocadillo of chorizo from the petrol-station fridge. Eat on the church steps at dusk; the stone still holds the day’s heat and swallows use the bell tower as a commentary box.

When the sky remembers it is high

Altitude changes the weather faster than the forecast admits. At 750 m winter can touch minus ten; roads become glassy after midnight and the village’s single streetlight flickers off to save the council €12 a month. Come between late April and mid-June and you get long, mild evenings: 22 °C at 7 p.m., skylarks still aloft, the smell of wet earth drifting in from irrigated lentils. August is the surprise: days bake at 34 °C but the nights drop to 14 °C, perfect for sleeping under one cotton blanket—provided you remembered to book somewhere. There is no hotel in Boada; the closest rural house is in Castil de Vela (18 km), where two double rooms run €70 a night, breakfast of churros and thick hot chocolate included. Owners Miguel and Pilar speak no English but understand “early checkout” if you need to catch the 07:10 AVE from Palencia to Madrid.

Fiestas for the diaspora

The patronal fiesta happens on the second weekend of August, timed so emigrants can prolong their summer holidays. The programme fits on a single A4 sheet taped to the church door: Saturday evening mass sung by a priest imported from Dueñas, followed by a communal paella cooked in a pan two metres wide. Bring your own plate and spoon; the village provides wine from a plastic drum labelled “Clarete 2022”. A disco follows, powered by speakers that used to belong to the Palencia fire brigade. Dancing starts at midnight and finishes when the generator runs out of diesel, usually around 03:30. Visitors are welcome but there is no tourist office to register interest; simply turn up, hover near the paella smoke, and someone will thrust a chorizo sandwich into your hand. Sunday is quieter: dominoes under the elm, a tractor-decorating contest judged by the oldest resident, and a slow procession back to the cemetery to lay flowers on graves that have waited a year for company.

Leaving without promises

Drive away at dawn and the plain behind you looks empty, but the statistics are reversing in microscopic increments. A couple from Santander has bought two houses to convert into a pottery workshop; fibre-optic cable reaches the boundary hedge next spring; the council in Palencia has earmarked €60,000 to shore up the church roof. None of this will turn Boada into the next Frigiliana, and that, you realise, is why you came. The village offers no postcard moment, no epiphany on a hilltop—only the rare sensation that the horizon is wider than your to-do list. Keep the tank half full, carry a spare bottle of water, and the place will still be there next year, give or take a soul.