Is there a book you’ve read that left you with an uncomfortable feeling? Years, perhaps decades pass. You can barely remember any specific details, but every time you think about it, the feeling returns, somewhere deep inside, somewhere between bittersweet nostalgia and existential malaise? I have a few I can think of: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and The Catcher in the Rye come to mind. Right now though, as the sun sits low on the horizon far across the cornfields to our left, I’m thinking about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and it’s hitting me hard.

Zen and the Art is one of those books that leaves you shellshocked. If you’re anything like me, you understood pretty much none of it, but somehow it left you jarred, not quite right. And right now I feel like Phaedrus, retracing my steps through a landscape I’ve known for twenty years, through an area I’m intimately familiar with, through a present that seems at once familiar but somehow receding and somehow declining, like this town, this countryside.

I feel like a time traveller.

One of the many joys that hiking has brought me is the experience of arriving in town on foot. Us urbanites don’t really do this any more - either we drive everywhere or there’s no discernible demarcation between one suburb and the next. Walking into a town or village is the exact opposite of touching down in a new city at night. Unless, perhaps, you sneak a peak out of the window and the night is clear, you’ll almost certainly land with little to no concept of the ‘emplacement’ of your destination: how it sits in relation to mountains, hills, rivers, roads, other towns, cities. It could be Bangkok or Boston, your body and senses are clueless either way. When you walk into a village, especially a tiny Castilian village where you can easily identify the last house, you cannot help but understand it. You subconsciously sense its relationship to the surrounding environment, the asphalt arteries that feed it, the subtle gradients that obscure it, then bring it into view as you slowly approach. You sense its presence as you approach. For the longest time you are an outsider and then suddenly, just like that, you’re in, and for the short but agreeable time, you are part of it.

As we come into San Pedro, about 6km into our hike, that feeling returns, but it’s mixed with something else. As we approach the church at the centre of the town, I know what it is. I’ve been here before. The holy building looks familiar. I see myself standing on the steps surrounded by people. Someone got married here. The Phaedrus feeling makes my hair stand on end. Hiking and deja-vu are a surprisingly potent cocktail. Jessi remembers: at the height of our career as wedding photographers (that’s to say, our third and penultimate gig) we shot M and V’s wedding right here. I remember yelling at someone’s grandma to get out of the group shot and then feeling instantly remorseful as she was comforted and ushered away by a grandchild, as I got the evil eye. That was over a decade ago now and we haven’t seen them since. The church hasn’t changed a bit; neither has the village really. A bit older, a few more ruins. Probably fewer people — hard to tell, we didn’t see anyone. In fact we didn’t see anyone at all for the duration of our three-hour hike.

Time travel is so easy here. It feels like cheating. Time just sort of stands still as you move through it, which means it’s moving backwards relative to you. Anyone familiar with rural, empty Spain must know this feeling.

As we press on towards Sahagun in the glow of an unseasonably warm December afternoon, Jessi catches site of a roadside building she recognises from her youth. In its heyday it was a thriving restaurant, she tells me; one of the best in the area. Every weekend in the Spring and Summer, families and friends congregated, weddings and christenings were celebrated, local wine flowed, laughter and music could be heard all the way up to the town. They even had their own bullring where the kids would chase after tame calfs while their parents knocked back cuba libres. Today it’s completely shuttered and the plaster is peeling from the faux-Roman arches that frame the entrance. The family’s second restaurant, in the centre of town, has also been shut for a year or two now. There’s just not enough people here to sustain it any more. The brothers have dispersed. Things aren’t going well for them.

Another few kilometres and we begin the gentle climb up to the flat plain that will lead us into town. The sun is all but set now and the tiny, isolated sprigs of wheat that have managed to push through the sodden ground are outlined in a million little halos. Subtle irregularities in an otherwise endlessly monotone landscape are thrown into shadow moments before the gold turns to dusty pink and the landscape returns to a featureless beige canvas as far as the eye can see.

I’m not really looking though.

I’m thinking about the restaurant. I’m thinking about Sahagun in its heyday. When I first came here, almost 20 years ago, the nightlife was epic, even by London standards. Now there is nothing. The town is a shell of what it was just two short decades ago. But you know what really bugs me? I try to explain to Jess but fail dismally. It’s too deep for a mid-hike monologue. I think I’d feel sort of OK about it, this whole rural decline thing, the España Vacia (empty Spain) if it was clear that it was leading somewhere, like if I felt that the future was some shining digital phoenix which would rise in place of these crumbling adobe ruins. The way I’ve always thought about it until this year. Change felt directional, meaningful: generations of young Spanish destined to escape rural poverty for better lives in Madrid, London, Berlin, San Francisco. The whole thing made sense until AI came along.

But now it doesn’t any more. If I could get my time travel on and jump forward another two decades, I don’t see the grandparents of these paisanos gracing the keyboards of Google or Meta. Barely any keyboard jockeys will be needed just two or three years from now, the way things are going, let alone two decades. The thought chills me and makes me angry. Rural Spain has paid the ultimate price for industrialisation and digitalisation - whole villages, whole communities lost to the hope of a prosperous future, and more disappearing each year. Ever fewer schools, doctors, shops.

Fibre optic internet arrived in our village two years ago, just around the same time as ChatGPT. The former heralded the arrival of digital prosperity, the latter the end.

That’s it. Nothing much really. Nothing that makes sense anyway. Just the feeling that walking through these semi-abandoned villages, finding myself in places I visited in what feels like another life, hearing Jess talk about a vibrant rural past, seeing the decay unfold in front of my eyes, makes me feel like a time traveler. I’m just not sure any more whether I’m travelling forwards or backwards?

We cleared our plot in the summer, but we’ve been noticing it gradually turning back into a rubbish dump as the months pass and it lays empty. Yesterday Jess saw a load of orange paint buckets in the corner and as we discussed it over dinner, Felisa sheepishly admitted that they were hers.

• “Why the hell are you hoarding paint buckets?”

• “I was hoping the rain would soften the paint so I can clean them up”.

• “What do you need buckets for?”

• “To collect rainwater”.

• “Why do you collect rainwater?”

• “To mop the floor”.

Felisa has an outside tap, but it’s at waist level and above a sink, so she can’t get a bucket under it. Even is she could, there’d be no way she could lift it down to the floor. Her ingenious solution is to just let nature do the work for her. She then transfers the rainwater to the mop bucket with an old tuna tin that I’ve been seeing around the garden for 20 years without ever realising it was a key implement in her water recycling system.

The village folk, especially the elders, are ingenious beyond anything I can fathom. They’ve had to make do with so little, for so long, that anything they can get their hands on is valuable and can be repurposed. Whereas we rely on book knowledge and throwing money at problems, they solve them with our trash. The paint buckets were being thrown away by Ricardo, which is how they ended up in the corner of our plot.

The downside of this is that when resources grew more abundant as the 20th century caught up with the village, Felisa and Arturo never stopped hoarding. When we cleared our plot, which had been their vegetable patch and general storage area, I threw away a full sack of 30-year old corn-on-the-cobs that Arturo had been keeping as fire starters as well as 13 brooms, handmade from twigs and bound with hey-bale string.

The house we’re living in, Felisa’s house, was built by her late husband Arturo, Jessi’s grandfather, a really, really long time ago, before they even got married. I call Felisa over and ask her which year the house was built. She tells me to wait, gets a pen, and starts doing maths in the corner of a crossword puzzle book. The equation looks like this: Arturo was born in 1928 and he was 27 when they got married. He had built the house 4 years before they tied the knot. Without so much as a calculator or even carrying a one, she was able to tell me the house was built in 1954 - 71 years ago.

Arturo was as ingenious as Felisa. I once witnessed him and an 80-year-old friend put up a wooden floor (not the floor covering, the actual floor structure) by sitting precariously on the beams with their feet dangling into the abyss below, all whilst swigging homebrew wine and munching on salchichon.

I knew he’d built this house with his own hands, but I wondered how much planning had gone into it. How much had the preparation for building a house changed in the last 70 years?

A lot, it turns out.

Over lunch I asked Felisa who had been the architect for this house. She burst out laughing, giving me the look she gives me when I ask silly guiri-city-boy questions like that. There was no architect. “No planning permission or anything like that?” I ask. “Nope”. Not even a bloody sketch on the back of a napkin. Arturo wanted to build a house, so he just rolled up his sleeves and built one.

Not quite actually - the real story is much more village and as usual, hilarious.

Arturo had a second cousin, Don Gregorio, who was a doctor in a village called Castrotierra, not a million miles from here, Felisa tells me. Don Gregorio had just built a house and local legend had it that this residence was the latest in construction technology. Arturo decided, given he had no building experience whatsoever, that he would just copy this house one-to-one.

That’s how things get done here, I’m starting to understand. People don’t fret about undertaking big projects like city folks do. There’s the assumption that if Don Gregorio, a medic from Castrotierra, can do it, then so can I because I’ll just ask him how he did it, he’ll tell me and I’ll copy him. He’ll probably come and help me too because he owes me for that sheep. No books, no YouTube, no £1000 weekend courses. Learn by doing, do by copying, and everyone chips in. The way it always has been.

Early afternoon, 8th of July, 1951. Arturo packs his mule with supplies for the journey - a traditional ‘bota’ of wine, a hunk of stale bread and his best clothes for the fiesta in Castrotierra that night. Arturo and Felisa are not a thing yet; they wont be married for a few years still. For now they both have girlfriends and boyfriends they’re not that keen on. Felisasa is with Abundio who can’t dance and she has a secret crush on Arturo. Arturo is no doubt looking forward to a big night of revelry.

Arturo sets off with Masimina and Conce and the mule under the scorching July sun. It hasn’t rained for months and the tracks are baked solid into twisting and rutted contortions that mess with the donkey’s footing. They head South towards Gordaliza before cutting West and heading down the track that will take them to Vallecillo. Don Gregorio doesn’t know they’re coming because there are no phones.

In Vallecillo, Arturo measures Don Gregorio’s house with a piece of string. Felisa was very clear on this - he was too poor to afford a measuring tape. He takes a mental note of all the architectural details. They continue on towards Castrotierra, stopping in Santa Cristina to leave the mule in Juan and Justa’s barn and change into their gladrags.

That’s as far as we can reconstruct the story. Again, Felisasa was not yet with Arturo at this point, so her account of it comes via an extensive gossip network and might not be completely factually accurate.

—

I thought it would be cool to try and find this mythical doctor’s house on which ours is based, so I ask Felisa if she thinks she could identify it if we drove to Castrotierra. She frowns and claims it would be impossible in such a big village. She tells me the villages have grown and changed beyond all recognition. But she’ll give it a go. I hate to tell her she’s talking out of her arse; the villages have done nothing but bleed population for the last 50 years. Most of them are semi-uninhabited by this point and look exactly the same as they did when Franco was in power, bar the presence of some unused, EU-funded exercise equipment for the geriatric. Honestly though, it would be a miracle if the house was even still standing. The local construction material of choice here has been ‘adobe’ (big homemade blocks made from a dried mix of mud and hey) for centuries. Houses made from adobe can last a very, very long time if cared for properly, or, as is often the case, supplemented with modern facing materials like brick or pebbledash. They also disintegrate slowly in the harsh Castilian climate if left to their own devices. Although it’s a beautiful concept in theory - a house slowly returning from whence it came, leaving little to no synthetic residue - it manifests itself in a distinctly ugly way: abandoned ruins gradually decaying amongst cheap, modern, brick structures. This is what the majority of villages here look like today: a total mess.

I sneak up to my computer and look down on Castrotierra from above on Google Earth. It looks exactly the same as our village, just smaller. There are two or three roads to explore, at most. It will probably take us all of 10 minutes to ascertain whether the house is still around. I announce to Jess that we are taking Felisa on an expedition to Castrotierra. Jess rolls her eyes as usual. I’m already dreaming of the tortilla sandwiches Felisa is going to make for the journey.

I go downstairs to break the news to Felisa but she’s waiting for me in the kitchen. Apparently she’s mixed up Gregorio with Gabino or Geronimo or someone else, and it wasn’t Castrotierra it was Vallecillo, she thinks. I curse her for messing up my story, and go back upstairs to the computer to find Valecillo, which is the next village along and looks exactly the same. I’m not even going to change the screenshot. That’s how it happened - first it was Castrotierra, but now she thinks its Vallecillo. In truth, both were involved.

Whichever it is, we’re going tomorrow, I decree. Felisa will make lentils for lunch and then we’ll all hit the road.

It’s raining pretty hard when we wake up and it’s not letting up as lunchtime approaches. We finish our lentils and Felisa lays down for a siesta as the rain starts to peter out and the clouds thin just a touch and I say we should go now before it starts to rain again.

We’re going to do this properly. We’ll do our best to retrace Arturo’s original journey through the fields using only tractor paths, avoiding the new road that could get us there in all of 8 minutes. The mud is thick and slippery as hell this time of year, and with today’s downpour there’s no guarantee we’ll make it, even in the 4x4.

The GPS is off, but it’s in my pocket as a backup; with a 90 year-old and an indifferent miniature pinscher as co-pilots, I don’t rate our chances too highly. We set off down the same track Arturo would have taken 70 years ago, although today the scene is very different. In some ways this village has changed beyond recognition, but in other ways it’s exactly the same, but that’s for another day. Today the difference is meteorological. The plains of Castilla are a canvas painted by the hand of mother nature. In summer, the skies are impossibly blue, the fields are deep, golden yellow and extend into the infinite horizons, the tracks are dusty, hard and make for easy going.

On this drizzly and overcast December afternoon, the tracks are all but impassable. The 4x4 lurches from side to side as the back wheels spin and slip over the mud that’s been churned to a gooey pulp by the local farmers. The ditches get deeper and deeper and we’re all squealing like a bunch of schoolkids as we plough through. The water that comes up to at least the wheel arches sprays out in a brown fanfare as we pass, leaving the windscreen coated in an opaque film. As we head down into the last valley before the village, there’s practically a lake at the bottom of the hill before the track makes the final climb back up. We go for it, vowing not to come back this way.

Felisa is having a blast and is grinning from ear to ear as she recounts stories from every bush and rut along the way.

As we pull into the village, Felisa instantly loses all her confidence in her ability to identify Don Gregorio’s house. The first house we see looks almost identical to hers and we think it might be the one, but the location isn’t quite right, so we pull up to a garage where we find the only human left in the village. We must have been a sight to behold - four out-of-towners, a jeep caked from top to bottom in mud, asking for directions to the house of a 120-year-old doctor.

“He’s dead, you know?”. We tell him we’re just looking for the house, not the man himself, which instantly sounds suspicious. He thinks his wife knows which house it is and goes in to find out. He comes back out and points us to the beginning of the village, just off the main square. The square contains another three practically identical houses. Clearly Arturo wasn’t the only one who had been inspired to copy Don Gregorio’s design - this village was packed with clones. It takes Felisa a while, but she finally identifies Don Gregorio’s house, mostly from the roof and the steps leading up to the door. Sure enough, it’s a facsimile of her house, the house Arturo built. It’s been dressed up in a smart brick facade, but the design is basically identical.

We felt pretty pleased with our afternoon’s detective work. Not only had we uncovered Felisa’s house’s lineage, but we’d also unwittingly solved the mystery of why there are at least 10 almost identical houses in Vallecillo that look significantly different to all the others. Rest in peace Don Gregorio.

Felisa and Arturo’s house has ceilings that are too high as well, but by now you understand that there was no architect involved in that outcome. Arturo wanted to place the house three blocks above street level to help evacuate rainwater and avoid the humidity gradually being sucked up the porous adobe walls. He’d already completed the main structure and started carting in earth to bring up the level when he realised how much work this would be and gave up on the idea. That’s how Arturo’s house ended up with high ceilings. No architecture degree, no CAD designs, no 3D projections, no Feng Shui. Just a man with a mule, a piece of string and a young girl who quite fancied him but was too shy to say. She’s still living here 70 years later, more than a decade after he’s passed, under these high ceilings, with her granddaughter, a strange Englishman and an indifferent miniature pinscher.

Rest in peace Arturo.

After dinner conversation in Spain often gets out of hand. Perhaps it’s because it happens so late everybody is delusional from tiredness, I don’t know, but a lot of stupid shit gets said.

Like tonight Ana recounted the story about her bandaging Rodrigo’s ears to his head when he was a baby so they wouldn’t stick out and then somehow they were suddenly talking about the shapes of people’s heads. Apparently us men are unlucky because we can’t hide the shapes of our heads, what with the bald n’all that. A woman on the other hand can have the weirdest shaped head and you’d never know with their long hair. So if you’re a guy with an odd shaped head, you’re out of luck. We all lamented the shapes of our own heads. Mine is too round, I said. Rodrigo’s is like a ‘pepinillo’ (gherkin) according to Susana.

And then, this being the village, they started on the shapes of the heads of everyone else in the village. “Mariano has a big head”, says Feli. “Yes, too big for his body”, Ana agrees. “He was always like that, even as a little kid”, nods Feli, sympathetically. Ana remembers. They rattle through the rest of the village, one by one. Every poor sod here has something wrong with the shape of their head according to these guys. They make it sould like a troglodyte village.

I’m flabbergasted they have such perfect recall of the shapes of 150 other heads, but it makes sense when you think about it. When you see the same 150 people almost exclusively, day after day, year after year, you probably do get the shape of their head indelibly imprinted on your brain. Perhaps the human brain is especially good at head shapes when absorbed in reasonable, village-size numbers. Perhaps city dwellers develop ‘Headshape Blindness’ from overexposure to other people’s head outlines. They all melt into one. I don’t believe I’ve ever paid the slightest bit of attention to the shape of anyone’s head, so I clearly have a long way to go. I can just about differentiate a human from a cow.

In general, they do know a lot about each other here. Too much. I guess that’s just the way it works. Feli has a comprehensive mental database of the gastronomical likes and dislikes of everyone that lives within a 200m radius, which is to say, the whole village. She’ll see a food and go ‘capers, oh yeah, Jorge loves them, but Julio’s not so keen and Anita’s husband got one stuck in his ear in 1952 and it got infected and he partially lost his hearing’, pointing at her ear and winking. This is unsurprising given it’s mostly all they talk about at mealtimes. They start with a food, say, mayonnaise, which Ricardo doesn’t like but Alberto does, but oh doesn’t Alberto really dislike fried liver, oh yeah he does but Pedrito really loves fried liver doesn’t he? And like this they go on for hours, looping through every conceivable foodstuff and 4 generations of 8 families. It’s like a mental training exercise for the most demanding memory game you can think of. I sometimes suggest we bring a whiteboard to dinner, because I quickly lose track of who dislikes sardines and whose favourite dish is garlic soup.

The service at the village shop is so slow and public that they all know what everyone buys anyway, so there’s not exactly any hiding your preferences. Go to the store and buy an avocado and you’ll be the talk of the town for three sunsets. Your legend will probably outlive you. You’ll be the guy who dared to ask for ‘aguacate’. If I’m around the village and need to know if Feli has gone and bought the bread yet, I don’t have to call her to ask. I can just ask anyone in the village. Yes, this is normal. I can literally just go up to someone in the street (rare, at this time of year) and ask ‘Has Feli gone for bread yet?’ and this person will almost certainly know the answer. News spreads fast in this village. There are no secrets. When you get in your car and drive off, 4 or 5 sets of curtains gradually part for a few seconds. “They went off about 6”, people will say over dinner. “Wonder where they went”. And this conversation may last 10 minutes or longer. When someone asks “how are you?” here, they’re taking notes.

Thankfully their ‘curiosity’ is topped only by their unrivalled capacity for gossip otherwise all this precious information would be lost, but luckily anything known by one person in the village is known by the whole village before you get home from the shop. It’s the rural version of social media. Anyway, gossiping is quite evidently what humans do in the wild, right? We evolved this compulsion to social narrative construction which bound us together more tightly into cooperative bands, doesn’t the story go? To gossip is to keep your social brain well oiled and efficient, which might go some way to explaining why the octogenarians around here are so on the ball.

This all sounds quite cute, but there’s a dark side to it too. I’ve always hated ‘persianas’ in Spain, especially in the village. These roller blinds, installed on every window on every house, produce the distinctive rhythmic clattering that forms the soundtrack of every pueblo, barrio and residential street in Spain. I’ve never understood why they bother, to be honest, since they’re just always closed, or cracked open 3cm at most. They open them for a few minutes in the morning, shake out a rug and air the room, then close them again. In the summer, it’s because it’s too hot and you can’t dare let the sun in. In the winter it’s because it’s too cold and you can’t dare leave the window exposed. This is why every Castilian village always looks like a ghost town when you drive through, unless its exactly 7pm and the zombie hordes are out for their cholesterol walk. Anyway, I quite recently discovered that the true role of ‘persianas’ probably has less to do with the weather and more to do with the desire to keep out prying eyes - a throwback to the civil war era when even close neighbours were pitted against each other and were thus keen to keep their secrets behind closed doors and windows.

When we tell people that we won’t be putting shutters on our new house, they don’t ask about energy efficiency, they say “but people will see everything you do”. I suppose they will, but I guess this is what you sign up for when you sign up for this village. Everyone will soon know about my round head, and whether I like (gasp) green pepper in my tortilla, and if I’ve been to the shop for bread yet and what time I go to bed. They’ll talk about it at family get togethers. Maybe weddings. In time, I too will probably be able to identify all my neighbours by the silhouette of their skull and likewise know which of them buys ready meals and doesn’t like goat cheese. I wonder what city knowledge will be squeezed out of my brain by this new delicate social tapestry I’m going to have to hold in working memory.

Until next time. And be careful where you put capers.