Boadilla del Camino

The first thing you notice is the column. A fifteen-foot sandstone stalk, polished smooth on one side where medieval chains once rubbed, stands in the middle of the only street. Nobody erects a gallows pillar in a place that expects to be noticed, yet here it is – Boadilla’s blunt reminder that for centuries this was simply somewhere judges passed through, pronounced sentence, and left.

Today the traffic is gentler. At dawn a loose queue of rucksacks clatters in from Frómista, six kilometres west. By mid-morning the same packs are propped against bar stools while their owners compare blisters over coffee that costs €1.20 if you pronounce it correctly, €1.50 if you don’t. By nightfall most have pushed on to Castrojeriz, another eight kilometres of arrow-straight track across the wheat. What happens in between is Boadilla’s entire economy.

A single-street lesson in scale

The village measures 300 metres from the rolled-steel grain silo at the eastern edge to the crumbling dovecote that leans over the western approach. At 780 m above sea level the air is thin enough to make an English cyclist wheeze, yet the land is so flat that the horizon appears to tilt. There is no bank, no chemist, no supermarket; even the yellow municipal rubbish bin looks apologetic. The parish church, Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, unlocks its doors for two hours on Saturday and whenever the key-keeper feels like it the rest of the week. Inside, a ninth-century baptismal font the colour of burnt cream sits opposite a plaster Virgin whose lace veil is renewed annually by the same two widows who polish the brass.

Outside, the plaza is simply a widening of the road. Taxi drivers from Palencia use it to turn round; farmers park beside the stone cross to check weather apps on their phones. The only consistent shade is cast by the pillory itself, which makes an odd picnic spot until you realise that every other bench is full of sun-beaten pilgrims uploading the same photograph: column, sky, wheat, repeat.

Water in a dry province

The Meseta is famous for lacking it, yet Boadilla owns a pool. The albergue “En El Camino” has tiled a former paddock into a 12-metre plunge bath, ringed by lavender and a low wall just high enough to hide your shoulders while you drink. Non-residents are welcome for the price of a caña (€2, Estrella Galicia, properly cold). Management – Portuguese, trilingual, relentlessly cheerful – will lend you a towel for a €5 deposit and pretend not to notice when you stay for three rounds. On afternoons when the thermometer nudges 38 °C the garden fills with accents from Lancashire to Perth, all comparing notes on bedbug strategy and the surprising deliciousness of beer-can chicken, the house speciality at €9.50.

If that sounds flippant, it isn’t meant to. After three days walking across treeless plateau, the sight of chlorinated water is as serious as religion. The pool closes at nine sharp; the last swimmer is hauled out complaining that Castilian dusk still feels like a hair-dryer.

The canal that never reached the sea

Ten minutes beyond the livestock trough at the village end, a path drops through reeds to the Canal de Castilla. Begun in 1753 and abandoned unfinished when rail arrived, the waterway was meant to carry grain north to the Cantabrian ports. Instead it serves as a linear park: flat, gravelled, shaded by lines of white poplar. Cyclists heading for the 16 km loop to Frómista and back will meet elderly locals walking dogs and, in April, clusters of Dutch bird-watchers who have driven down with scopes on tripods. Keep binoculars handy: avocets patrol the shallow edges, and in spring the reeds explode with reed-warblers that sound like poorly-oiled bicycles.

Summer is different. By July the canal is often a damp ditch; the towpath dust gets into your shoes and forms pale crusts on sweaty calves. Take water – there is no fountain between the village and the lock at San Nicolás, two kilometres east.

Food without flourish

Even Spain can produce a dull menu del día when the audience is captive. The local menú del peregrino runs to watery garlic soup, pork chop with frozen chips, yoghurt whose foil lid never quite peels off. It costs €11 and arrives within seven minutes, timed to get walkers back on the path before the sun peaks. Better to order off the chalkboard: tortilla de patatas thick as a paperback, still runny in the middle, or the aforementioned chicken slow-steamed over half a can of lager. Vegetarians cope on tortilla alone; vegans should refill in Frómista.

Breakfast is more encouraging. The bar opens at 6 a.m. and the owner keeps a jar of Nescafé beside the espresso machine for those who still miss instant. Toast comes with a foil packet of confit tomato sauce – bizarre, yet after 20 km it tastes like home.

When to come, when to leave

April and late-September give you daylight without furnace heat. In October storks assemble on the silo roof, practising thermals before crossing the Pyrenees; the wheat stubbles turn bronze and the church smells of candle smoke. May can be perfect, but Spanish school parties sometimes descend at midday, thirty teenagers taking selfies with the pillory while a harassed teacher counts heads. If the coaches are in, keep walking; the canal path is long enough to absorb them.

Winter is austere. Night temperatures drop below –5 °C, the albergue heating switches off at eleven, and the pool is covered with plywood painted the exact blue of summer. Still, the light is diamond-sharp and you will have the column to yourself, snow drifting across the chain-worn groove like sifted icing sugar.

The honesty clause

Boadilla is not a destination. It is a comma in a longer sentence, good for an afternoon’s pause or a single night’s sleep. Stay longer and you start to notice the scruffy plots, the shuttered houses whose owners left for Valladolid in 2008 and never came back, the faint smell of slurry when the wind swings east. The village functions because people pass through; without the Camino the roll of inhabitants would shrink from 120 to double figures and the bar would close by eight.

That dependence makes hospitality genuine but fragile. Treat it gently: pay for your glass of tap water if that’s all you order, resist the urge to camp beside the canal, and remember that the pool is a gift, not a right. Enjoy the column, the birdsong, the improbable blue rectangle of water in a province that averages 450 mm of rain a year – then shoulder your pack and keep walking. Boadilla will revert to its quiet equilibrium thirty minutes after you leave, which is exactly how it survives.