Stage Boadilla del Camino to Terradillos de los Templarios (by bike)

At 51.8 kilometres, this stage crosses the heart of the Tierra de Campos, the cereal meseta that many pilgrims dread for its monotony and which on a bicycle becomes, on the contrary, the most rewarding part of the Camino: firm surface, an almost horizontal profile and kilometres that fall by themselves. The only enemy is the wind, which here blows unobstructed, and the total absence of shade.

Leaving Boadilla del Camino, which preserves a notable fifteenth-century Gothic pillory, links within a few kilometres with the Canal de Castilla. Its towpath, laid out in the eighteenth century to carry Castilian grain north, offers one of the most placid stretches of the whole route, among poplar groves and locks, before reaching Frómista.

There waits the church of San Martín de Tours, of the eleventh century, considered the purest model of Romanesque on the Camino for the perfection of its massing and for the more than three hundred corbels running along its eaves. Beyond it, the route follows through Población de Campos and Villalcázar de Sirga, where Santa María la Blanca, built by the Templars, astonishes by its size in so small a village.

Carrión de los Condes marks the midpoint of the day. It was one of the most populous towns on the medieval Camino and preserves the monastery of San Zoilo, with its Plateresque cloister, and the doorways of Santa María del Camino and Santiago. From here begins the hardest section: seventeen kilometres along the old Roman road to Calzadilla de la Cueza, dead straight, without a single fountain or tree.

Past Ledigos, the day ends at Terradillos de los Templarios, a hamlet of adobe whose name betrays the commandery the Order of the Temple held here, and where tradition places the legendary hidden treasure of the Templars. It is also the exact midpoint between Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Santiago.