North From Salamanca

A dark-green, dirt-brown landscape - so flat I feel, weirdly, I'm falling into the sky. Strip after strip of maize, long-harvested, stalks dry and decayed; the bright green shoots of other cereals pushing through; small plots of black, twisted vines; empty hectares where sunflowers bloomed in the summer.

The Camino: a long, straight track, sandy and puddled, stretching from horizon to horizon. Wheeled, tubular irrigators, abandoned for the winter, span the fields like giant metal insects, or like lines of aeroplanes parked wing-tip to wing-tip. A light aircraft buzzes across, then flies back even lower. I feel like Cary Grant in the crop-sprayer scene from Hitchcock's North By Northwest.

The only verticals are electricity pylons, church bell towers and me, a tiny speck of pilgrim, battling northwards against the wind and hail. The morning snow's been left behind on the hills beyond El Cubo de la Tierra del Vino. I press on harder, keen to escape black clouds rolling in from the west. But the rain tips down. The track becomes yet muddier. I slip and slide. Over the weeks I feel I've had half the earth of Spain sticking to my boots. There are few trees here, few birds - just a solitary kite which spirals up, then glides off silently into nothingness.

Leaving one village, I see the next one crouch between earth and sky ten kilometres in the future. These are ordinary, back-country pueblos of concrete-surfaced streets and low houses of plaster, brick and stone. At the village boundaries half-built houses gape forlornly. Scrappy little trees grow in containers improvised from car tyres and plastic fertilizer tubs. The recession has hit Spain hard.

They call it Spain's bread basket here. I call it Kansas - but with shrines and saints. Or Lincolnshire - but with decent wine and olives.

(Posted from Zamora, on the Vía de la Plata, Spain.)