It's definitely early spring on the plains of Castille y Leon. Not so much north of the Cantabrian massif. So we shelved our plan to find a place to stay with good transport links into Bilbao and opted to make our way northwards more slowly and enjoy the sunshine.
We often use the "search for sites' app to find new places to stay. The reviews can be idiosyncratic but they do alert you to spots that are problematic. We wondered if it might be interesting to stay in the area autocaravanas at Rueda. The name is familiar to us, we've consumed many bottles of the crisp white wine produced in the place. It's fun to be able to contour up an image of its terroir when you have glass of wine. Given how much we've travelled in southern Europe over the last twelve years then our inner wine gazetteer has become quite comprehensive.
For somewhere with a wine that graces the shelves of more or less every supermarket in Spain it seemed a bit odd that there were only a handful of reviews about Rueda's area autocaravanas, especially as village is situated a couple of kilometres east of the A-6, one of the main routes south from Santander. The reviews were lukewarm, noting that the parking bays were narrow, the service point primitive and the place was awkwardly close to a children's play park.
This proved to be the case. However, the motorhome parking was not the only peculiar thing about Rueda. The viniculture that surrounds the place is massive, a prairie of vines stretching far across the flat plain. Boxy distribution warehouses dot the landscape, they look recently constructed. They're not like a French cave cooperative with a cute shop, only forty ton trucks are welcome here.
We took a short stroll down towards the centre of Rueda. Is it a small town or a big village, we wondered. Either way it was deserted, not quiet, more post apocalyptically unpeopled.
The wide main street was wide with a sunken stream running down one side. The buildings were ancient, but well restored, they had a kind of toytown perfection about them. We found a couple of wine merchants warehouses, one had a shop with opening hours saying it was open but the door was locked. Another across the road was similarly shuttered. From its website it seemed the place specialised in pre-booked tours at €50 euros per person. Not our thing, we just wanted to buy a couple of bottles of local wine.
A bus arrived, stopped at the shelter briefly, no one alighted, so it drove off, adding to a general sense of abandonment. The only person we came across was a municipal worker with a wide brush. She meticulously tidied a patch of gravel even though it was litter free to begin with
As well as old wine warehouses the main street had two interesting looking churches. The first was baroque with two round towers, Each had a conical roof like a witches hat. It looked more like something you might find next to the Loire rather than in Castille y Leon.
The other was more ancient and had an octagonal layout, again quite unusual in Spain.
We decided to head back to the van. One of the closed wineries displayed half a dozen old barrels painted in a naive, folksy style. They must welcome customers sometimes, but definitely not today.
We were still Billy no mates when we got back to the van and remained that way until we left next morning. The only people we encountered turned up in the early evening when a few parents arrived at the play park with their toddlers.
I whiled away the time updating the blog and chatting about where next. Our decision - head for the area autocaravanas operated by a petrol station on the outskirts of Palencia. We have visited the outskirts of the city regularly, but never stayed overnight or visited the centre. Palencia is our usual lunchtime stopping place after arriving in Santander on the early morning ferry. A car park near the university has dedicated motorhome bays and is five minutes from Mercadona - perfect for stocking-up the fridge after 30 hours on the ferry.
The area autocaravanas run by the garage turned out to be much quirkier than that. The petrol station itself was somewhat eccentric. The owner expressed his interest in vintage cars, by displaying disfunctional ones decorated garishly and featuring life-size figurines. I refuelled the moho next to Betty Boop themed stretched limo. Nearby Elvis posed at a jaunty angle next to a pink Cadillac which seemed to have noze-dived into the ground. A wingless banana yellow Cessna was parked in the corner.
The area autocaravanas is across the road, and free so long as you spend at least €5.00 euros at the garage. It's a good deal. It has lots of space next to a car and truck wash. There's even a dedicated bay for motorhomes with a gantry so you can wash the roof.
I love the random places you end up in when you travel by motorhome. Just to add to the peculiar mix, right next to the garage is a very old looking church. I wondered if it might even be Visigothic. After a bit of AI fuelled research assisted by Google translate I ascertained my hunch was half right. Parroquia de Nuestra Señora de Allende el Río is the oldest church in Palencia. Though most of the building dates from the twelfth century the lower section of the tower is thought to be Visigothic.
The northern part of Spain was under the control of Moorish forces for a relatively short period and never fully pacified. In the late eighth century it formed a liminal, depopulated 'badland' between the Christian Kingdom of Asturias to the north and Caliphate to the south and east. After Burgos was retaken by Christian forces in 884 and a new archbishopric established, a subsidiary bishopric developed in Palencia. A small church dedicated to 'Our Lady' behind the garage venerating Elvis witnessed all this history and remained, so it seems, a place of worship throughout. It's a wonderful thing the way the sacred and the profane, the significant and the trite, the past and present are all woven into a single place; so often the joy of travel is coincidental rather than purposeful.
It's a twenty minute walk from the motorhome parking lot to Palencia's Playa Mayor. The Rio Carrión lies in-between, the footpath wanders through some woods then across an ancient stone bridge.
Judging from the crumbling stone monuments dotted about the area it seems the woods originated as the park of some noble pile. That must have been a while ago as the later municipal additions have had time to fall into disrepair, and the whole place looks somewhat run down.
Though dishevelled and graffiti daubed it's not unloved. Even on a weekday morning there were plenty of people about, a couple of young men fishing from the bridge, retirees taking a constitutional, joggers and dog walkers, a student sitting on a bench lost in a book, a Chinese woman who looked much younger than she probably was doing yoga in a shadowy spot by the river. It felt remote and peaceful despite being only a few hundred metres from the city centre.
The city itself is a mixture of old and new, a typical small industrial city. Gill reckoned that the British equivalent would be in the Midlands, "Loughborough," she suggested. "Maybe Stafford," I added.
The oldest part was around the Gothic cathedral and Playa Major.
In-between, the ancient rectilinear plan remains, but sometime between the fifties and seventies many streets had been redeveloped, it all looked somewhat bland and corporate. Each pedestrianised street looked identical, it was very easy to get lost, which we promptly did.
We had spotted a well reviewed traditional tapas bar near the central market. It turned out to be more 'local' than we anticipated and the welcome somewhat frosty, so we headed down a nearby street and found a more modern cafe, it looked to be part of a chain, a Spanish version of Costa Coffee, we decided.
Palencia is probably more typical of the Spain of today than some touristy hotspot like Avila. It doesn't feel impoverished, but it's not exactly thriving. An article I found talked about how young people were moving away from Palencia to find work in nearby Valladolid which is a large scale manufacturing hub. It's an issue affecting the UK's smaller cities too, as educational attainment improves higher achieving school leavers head to university and find better paid jobs in thriving cities
Their hometowns get 'left behind'. It's what we both did, followed by all three of our children, two now live in London, our youngest in Tokyo.
Theoretically the growth of remote working should have been good news for towns and small cities. However, it's not only about work, small towns aren't seen as cool, they lack fashionable places to meet and lack the urban vibe that young people crave. The one thing they do offer is more affordable housing, which is part of the reason why we ended up living in a town rather than a city. Perhaps governments need to take positive action to achieve a more balanced demographic. They could incentivise inward migration by offering discounted council tax to under thirties in towns with an ageing demographic and provide low cost co-working spaces. Something needs to be done to revitalise Europe's grey-haired hinterlands.
In Palencia preparations for Semana Santa were one step ahead of Avila and Salamanca. The main square was at a similar stage of municipal construction, but on the streets a small pre-Easter procession wounds its way through the old town.
It consisted of a slightly disorganised parade of tweenies and younger teenagers wearing conical cardboard penitent hats chivvied along by attendant adults, their teachers I presumed.
I found it uncomfortable to watch. Spain's major Easter events usually involve garish religious floats shouldered by the beefier members of the local confraternities. They're a trial of strength as much as an expression of faith. The point is the adult participants are willing; I wondered just how much choice these kids had about participating in a public expression of faith.
I wondered about how much influence the Catholic church had these days in Spain's state education system. A Chatgpt question! My new AI buddy came up with a surprising conclusion, similar to the UK. Like in England religious education is mandatory in schools directly funded by the state, however in Spain pupils can opt to attend classes in ethics and philosophy instead, which is something which would be good to adopt in the UK too. Just as England has CofE and RC sponsored schools, Spain's 'concertados' schools are state funded, but privately run, most administered by the Catholic church.
Theoretically this gives people choice Though I can't speak for Spain, but in the UK practically speaking parents often have little choice but to use the nearest infant or primary school and if it happens to be CofE sponsored it will espouses Christian values rather than secular.
This was certainly the case so far as our kids were concerned. When we moved to Buxton we bought a Victorian cottage on the western edge of town. The nearest primary school served the mainly middle class area of Burbage. Unsurprisingly it had a good reputation, performed well academically and prided itself on traditional values to do with positive behaviour and discipline. In other words a typical CofE infant and junior school. The extent the local parish priest was involved in the school and the place's overtly Christian ethos was irritating, and as teachers ourselves committed to child-centred values the place seemed annoyingly blind to individual needs. The school worked well for our middle child who was naturally outgoing and competitive. Our eldest, a more introverted child, but bright and reading books for pleasure far in advance of his peers quickly became bored and miserable. Our youngest too was unhappy there, her reticence misinterpreted as disinterest. Admittedly I'm talking about 25 years ago, things may different now.
So far as the Christian ethos was concerned, we put up with it, but I don't know how the school would have managed if Buxton had been a more multicultural community.
State schools should be secular in my view. The English equivalent of the pointy penitents hats on the kids on the streets of Palencia has to be wrapping the heads of seven year olds in checky tea towels and making them await the arrival of an 'angel of the Lord' in the school nativity play. Who benefits from these traditions? Not the kids for sure.