Cañas

The bell in the mud-brown tower strikes twelve and a door in the monastery wall swings open. Visitors who have been loitering in the forecourt—English number plates, cycling jerseys, a spaniel on a lead—shuffle forward. Sister Esther appears, wimple slightly askew, and greets the group with the brisk warmth of a teacher who knows her class is bright but restless. Within five minutes she has explained why the Cistercians chose this patch of Riojan scrubland in 1170, teased a teenager for checking his phone, and promised “manuscripts older than Magna Carta, but considerably better preserved.” Nobody asks where the gift shop is; there isn’t one.

Canas itself sits four kilometres south of the monastery gate, a single-lane road winding through wheat and young tempranillo vines. At 643 m it is high enough for the air to feel rinsed, especially when the north wind drags clouds across the Cantabrian ridge. The village is often ten degrees cooler than Logroño on summer afternoons, a fact appreciated by the handful of Britons who break the drive to Santander here rather than push on to the coast. They arrive expecting a quick coffee, stay for the silence, and leave promising to send postcards they never quite post.

The village that forgot to sell souvenirs

There are no postcards for sale in Canas. Nor fridge magnets, nor bottles labelled “authentic Rioja potion.” The single grocery closed in 2019; the bakery survives by supplying restaurants in nearby Laguardia with bread rolls at dawn. What remains is a grid of stone-and-adobe houses, their wooden balconies painted the colour of ox blood, and a church whose sixteenth-century doorway still bears the grooves made by sharpening knives during the Carlist wars. Walk the two main streets slowly—Calle Real and Calle de la Iglesia—and you will count twenty-seven front doors, three sleeping cats, and one elderly man watering geraniums with a plastic yogurt pot. That is the entire census between siesta and evening mass.

Outsiders sometimes assume such emptiness equals decline, yet the village functions on its own terms. The ayuntamiento has installed fibre broadband; two houses are let to remote workers from Madrid who consider the rent—€300 a month—outrageously cheap. A British couple who bought a ruin in 2021 now spend April and October here, growing lettuces in the old threshing circle and driving to Bilbao for theatre fixes. They report that neighbours still deliver surplus peppers without being asked, and that nobody has mentioned council tax in two years.

Walks that taste of wheat and wind

North of the last lamppost the tarmac stops and the grain begins. A signed footpath, the Senda de los Monjes, follows an irrigation ditch to the monastery in forty minutes. The route is flat, shadeless, and alive with larks; take water because the fountain marked on the 1957 map dried up long ago. For something stiffer, continue past the monastery car park and climb the pine ridge behind. The track gains 250 m in two kilometres, enough to see the Ebro valley unfurl like a brown carpet edged with violet mountains. In May the undergrowth smells of thyme and discarded blossom; after October the same path can be treacherous with loose shale and should not be attempted in trainers.

Cyclists arrive with thicker tyres and bigger appetites. The circuit through Villabuena, Samaniego and back to Canas is 45 km, rolling rather than cruel, and ends at La Casona de Cañas just in time for lunch. The restaurant occupies a former tithe barn; beams blackened by four centuries of smoke hang low enough to brain a tall Lancastrian. The menu is short—lamb chops, peppers stuffed with salt cod, a vegetarian option involving eggs and regret—yet everything is cooked on an open fire that snaps and hisses like a living thing. House red comes from Bodegas Luis Cañas down the road: lighter than the usual Rioja, more Beaujolais than blackberry jam, and dangerously drinkable at €3.50 a glass.

Wine without the coach-party soundtrack

That winery draws the real crowds. Tour buses swing through the gates at eleven sharp, disgorge thirty Germans, and depart before the villagers have finished breakfast. Inside, stainless-steel vats gleam like space rockets and the gift shop sells golf shirts in Pantone-perfect shades. The contrast with the monastery could not be starker: here the talk is of phenolics and French oak, not psalms and silence. A basic visit costs €12 and includes three glasses; the premium tasting adds a 2001 gran reserva and a slab of cheese the size of a paperback. British visitors consistently praise the staff for “not laughing at our school Spanish” and for shipping mixed cases to Sussex at rates lower than UK duty.

Back in the village the only sound is the clicking of a sprinkler. Afternoon sun hardens the adobe walls to brick; shadows shrink to nothing. This is the hour when guidebooks recommend a siesta, yet the church stays unlocked. Inside, the air smells of wax and extinguished matches. A single bulb illuminates a polychrome Virgin whose robe has faded to the exact pink of a Marks & Spencer prawn sandwich. Sit for five minutes and you will hear your own pulse, perhaps the swish of a car on the distant road, nothing more. It is the opposite of a cathedral city: instead of grandeur, intimacy; instead of wonder, calm.

When to come, when to stay away

April and late-September offer the kindest light and the fewest tour coaches. Daytime temperatures hover around 18 °C, ideal for walking without carrying an electrolyte pharmacy. In July the thermometer can touch 35 °C; the monastery remains cool but the village streets become frying pans, and the bar closes at three whether you are thirsty or not. Winter is a gamble. Snow is rare, yet the pass from Burgos can ice over and the monastery shuts entirely in January. If you do arrive between December and February, bring a coat that understands wind and book dinner early—La Casona’s chef leaves at nine to help his daughter with homework.

Mobile signal improves by the year, though EE still drops out beside the cemetery. Download an offline map before setting off on walks and carry cash; the nearest ATM is in Nájera, fifteen minutes by car, and it charges €2.50 for the privilege of dispensing your own money. Petrol is cheaper at the supermarket on the Logroño ring road—fill up before you head north and you will have enough left for a bottle of the nuns’ walnut liqueur, sold from a side door on honour-system terms.

Parting shot

Leave Canas as you found it: quietly. The neighbours will notice if you slam car doors at dawn; the dogs will bark and the spell will break. Drive south with the windows open and the smell of wet earth in your nostrils, and try to remember the exact moment when the church bell stopped echoing. You will fail, of course, but that is part of the bargain. Some places do not yield souvenirs; they offer absence instead, a negative space you can carry for years without customs asking questions.