We stayed at La Posada de Castrojeriz, a nicely appointed 3-star hotel not far from the centre of town and with a restaurant just 10 metres down the street.
There was a nice view from my room over the Meseta and the sun came out for a bit as we had a drink and some ice-cream before dinner. All weather forecasts indicated that today would be extremely wet and the clouds this morning led to a scenic sunrise.
A quick look back down our street and a view of the main church above us as we said goodbye to Castrojeriz, before heading along a path bordered by colourful fields towards the big climb of the day.
It was a steep climb up to the top of the Alto de Mostelares (c915m) which is the highest point of the Meseta – a plateau covering a large part of the Iberian Peninsula’s interior, bounded by the Sistema Central mountain range and drained by the Douro, Tagus and Guadiana rivers. Thankfully the clouds stayed high enough that we could enjoy the views back towards Castrojeriz.
The view in the direction of our travel was just as good – it’s hard to describe the vastness of the Meseta without seeing it first hand – the iPhone camera simply can’t do it justice. We descended down a steep concrete path until the ground levelled out and we were back to walking between the fields of crops. The Sainfoin field was particularly pretty and stood out amongst all the greenery.
We stopped at the Ermita de San Nicolás de Puente Fitero For quick stamp in our pilgrim’s passport and carried on to the ninth century bridge – Puente Filtero – across the River Pisuerga. The bird noise was so loud here that I turned on the Merlin app so make some sense of it – Wren, Greenfinch, Goldfinch, Warblers (Cetti, Bonelli and Reed), Blue Tit, Serin, Nightingale, Swift, Chaffinch, Greenshank, Sparrows (Common, Rock, Tree and Spanish), Chiffchaff, Song Thrush and a Cuckoo were all identified in a 10 minute spell. Then, passing through Itero de la Vega, we spotted a number of Storks nesting on a building roof.
The hedgerows were starting to be filled with poppies as we headed towards the Canal de Castilla. We then walked alongside the canal for a while – apparently at one stage we were on the Acueducto de Valdecornete but we didn’t notice the canal leaving the ground at all. A nice series of ancient locks and yet another stork in its nest heralded our arrival into Fromista. For all the forecasts of heavy rain we only experienced some light rain towards the end of the walk.
