The emptiest corner of Castile, a windswept town on the Duero that turned a poet's grief into its whole personality — and somehow made that beautiful.
Soria province has the lowest population density in Spain outside the Pyrenees — some maps of Europe use it as the go-to comparison for emptiness, a rural depopulation so severe that “Soria ya es Suiza,” people joke bitterly, “Soria is basically Switzerland now,” meaning: mountains, silence, and almost nobody left. I drove in across a high, bare meseta under a sky that felt enormous, and understood before I’d even parked why this particular stretch of Castile produced one of Spain’s most aching bodies of poetry.
Machado’s Soria
Antonio Machado taught French here for four years starting in 1907, married a local girl named Leonor Izquierdo when she was fifteen and he thirty-three, and then, devastatingly, lost her to tuberculosis barely three years later. His collection Campos de Castilla, largely written here, turned the town’s poplars, its ochre hills, and the slow curve of the Duero river into some of the most quoted landscape poetry in the Spanish language. You can’t walk along the Paseo de los Machado, the riverside promenade named for him, without the town constantly reminding you of this — plaques with his verses, a statue, the Ermita de Nuestra Señora del Mirón where Leonor is buried nearby in the municipal cemetery he wrote about so plainly it still stings to read.
I walked that riverside path in late afternoon, past exactly the kind of chopos — black poplars — Machado immortalized, their leaves doing that particular silver-flash thing in the wind that made me finally understand a line of his I’d read a dozen times without quite feeling it. Some places you have to stand in before a poem makes sense. This was one of them.
San Juan de Duero and an Empty Cloister
The other reason to come to Soria sits just across the river: the ruined monastery of San Juan de Duero, its roofless twelfth-century cloister ringed with arches that interlace in an unmistakably Mudéjar way — pointed Gothic and horseshoe Islamic forms crossing each other, likely the work of masons influenced by the Knights Hospitaller, who once held the monastery. Without a roof, the arches frame nothing but open sky, and I had the entire place to myself on a Tuesday morning, which felt less like luck and more like Soria’s default condition.
That night I ate torreznos — Soria’s brutally simple, deeply satisfying fried pork belly, crackling and rendered until it’s almost more crunch than meat — in a bar just off the Plaza Mayor, alongside a glass of the region’s tempranillo. The town felt half-asleep even at nine o’clock, which after Madrid or Barcelona was its own kind of relief. Soria doesn’t perform. It just endures, quietly, the way its poplars keep bending in that endless wind.
When to go: September and early October bring the clearest air and the poplars along the Duero turning gold, which is more or less exactly the light Machado wrote about.