Fuentes de Nava

A Castilian farming town in Palencia where six churches once served three thousand souls, and works by Pedro Berruguete still hang in the converted church that now serves as its sacred art museum.

A walled medieval town in Palencia's Tierra de Campos, dominated by a castle and a collegiate church whose tower the locals call the Giralda of the Plains, declared a historic monument and one of Spain's most beautiful villages.

The provincial capital of Palencia carries layers from Celtiberian settlement through Visigothic royal court to medieval kingdom, and stands today as home to one of Spain's largest Gothic cathedrals and a Christ statue counted among the world's tallest.

A castle town on the Castilian plain of Valladolid, where an Iron Age Vaccean city, a Roman municipium, and a medieval fortress built by one of the region's most powerful noble families all occupy the same promontory above Tierra de Campos.

Sitting at the confluence of the Pisuerga and Carrión rivers in Palencia, Dueñas guards a surviving medieval gateway, a Roman mosaic in its soil, and a history that stretches from Bronze Age settlements to the old royal road to Burgos.

The City of the Admirals in the Tierra de Campos, its arcaded main street and soaring Gothic churches a legacy of wealth from the wool and grain trade.

A prosperous medieval town on the Palencia stretch of the Camino de Santiago, Carrión de los Condes preserves two outstanding Romanesque churches, a monastery with a Renaissance cloister, and fragments of its old walls.

A Leonese plains town where Spain's first purpose-built artillery castle still stands above a palace that the local people bought back from their counts for six pesetas.

Once the "Spanish Cluny", a Benedictine monastery town on the Camino de Santiago in León whose Mudéjar brick churches mark one of medieval Iberia's great artistic and religious centres.

A fortified market town on the plains of León, where stretches of medieval wall still stand, a hilltop castle rises in ruins above the old streets, and the layout of the town speaks to a thousand years of kings, lords, and contested frontiers.