Villodre

The grain silos appear first, rising from the wheat like grey rockets on a launch pad. Then the church tower, disproportionately tall for twenty-odd souls, and finally the houses—thick-walled, low-roofed, many tilting gently towards the earth that built them. Villodre materialises on the Palencia plain with the abruptness of a mirage, 770 m above sea level and light-years away from the nearest dual carriageway.

Adobe, air and silence

There is no visitor centre, no ticket booth, no explanatory panel. What you get instead is a masterclass in Castilian mud-brick architecture thrown open to the sky. Adobe walls the colour of dry biscuits enclose corrals where chickens and rusted ploughs coexist. A single row of bricks, darker than the rest, shows where someone repaired a gable in 1953; the date is scratched underneath, along with initials that no living resident can decipher. Peer into the half-collapsed smithy and you will still smell charcoal. The place is lived-in, but only just—population nineteen at the last count, up from fourteen the decade before.

Walk the perimeter in twenty minutes. Longer if you stop to read the stone plaques beside the few rehabilitated houses: most were bought by weekenders from Valladolid who wanted somewhere quiet to keep bee-hives or restore a motorbike. Their 4×4s, parked beside barn doors big enough for ox-carts, are the only giveaway that the twenty-first century has noticed Villodre at all. Mobile signal flickers in and out; 5G is a fantasy. The quiet is so complete you can hear wheat husks scraping each other in the breeze.

The horizon as an attraction

Outside the village the land performs its usual Castilian magic: flat, then suddenly not. The path south-east towards Boada de Campos climbs a low rise; from the crest the plain fans out like a yellow sea stitched together with electricity pylons. Keep walking and you will share the track with the occasional tractor and, in late April, clouds of calandra larks tossing themselves skywards. There are no signposts, so time your turn-around by the church clock you can still see—when it chimes, head back.

Serious walkers can link a chain of half-empty hamlets—Villodre, Boada, Melgar de Arriba—into a 16 km loop that never strays more than 3 km from the nearest house. Ordnance Survey precision this is not: the farmer’s idea of a right of way is whatever his tractor has flattened this year. Wear boots after rain; the clay sticks like wet cement and will add half a kilo to each foot within fifty metres.

Roast lamb and where to find it

Food is not Villodre’s strong suit—there is not even a bar. Stock up in Palencia (40 min by car) or time your visit around lunch in Saldaña, 18 km west, where Asador Casa José still cooks lechazo in a wood-fired brick oven. A quarter portion feeds two Brits comfortably; order the house red, a robust Cigales that costs under €14 a bottle and tastes like liquid blackberries. Vegetarians should head for Saldaña’s La Tahona de la Abuela, where roast piquillo peppers come stuffed with mushroom rice and the local cheese is made, improbably, from buffalo milk.

If you insist on picnicking in Villodre itself, bring everything. The lone shop closed when the owner died in 2011; the fountain in the plaza is drinkable but warm. A stone bench beside the church offers the only shade big enough for a sandwich—sunhat essential from March to October, when temperatures can touch 35 °C despite the altitude.

Seasons of wheat and wolves

Come too early and the village is brown; come too late and it is beige. The brief window is mid-April to mid-May, when the wheat turns emerald and poppies bleed scarlet across the fields. At dawn the thermometer can read 4 °C; by 11 a.m. you will be in shirtsleeves. Autumn is the second-best bet: stubble fires perfume the air and combine harvesters crawl like orange beetles across the stubble. Winter is brutal—gale-force winds, horizontal sleet, and the occasional wolf print pressed into the mud along the river. Summer belongs to the tractors; their dust hangs in the air for hours, coating every car, rucksack and camera lens with a fine golden powder.

Access reflects the seasons. The CV-232 from Palencia is kept open even after snow, but the final 6 km dip down to Villodre can ice over overnight. Carry chains if you are travelling between December and February; the council grades the road “third priority”, which is bureaucratic shorthand for “you’re on your own”.

Why bother?

Because Villodre is the Spain that guidebooks used to call “undiscovered” before they discovered it—and then forgot it again. There is no Instagram hotspot, no artisanal cheese stall, no boutique hotel run by an expat decorator. What you get instead is a village fighting, almost silently, to stay alive: one repainted façade, one newly planted pear tree, one returned grandson at a time. Stand beside the war memorial at 7 p.m. on a weekday and you will hear two things: the church bell striking the hour and, somewhere out in the fields, a dog barking at its own echo. Ten minutes later even the dog gives up.

Drive away at dusk and Villodre shrinks back to a tower and a promise: that emptiness still exists, that not every silence has been monetised, that you can still lose yourself in Europe without a parking meter in sight. Just remember to fill the tank before you arrive—the nearest petrol station is 25 km distant and it shuts at nine.