Celada del Camino: a roadside village on the way to Santiago

Its very name tells you what Celada del Camino has always been: a village by the road. Set on the flat country of the Campos de Mucho, south-west of Burgos, this small place of around a hundred people grew up beside the old royal road towards Valladolid, a route walked for centuries by merchants, kings and pilgrims.

By the royal road

The village stands today on one of the variants of the Camino de Santiago, and local tradition recalls the passage of illustrious travellers; an old inscription on a house front near the church boasts that kings always lodged there. The flat, open landscape of the northern meseta, crossed by the river Arlanzon just to the south, sets the scene.

The parish church

Celada's chief monument is its parish church, a building of late Romanesque tradition touched by the coming of Gothic, in the austere Cistercian manner. Its rounded apse, reinforced on the outside by six buttresses, and its deeply splayed doorway with carved capitals are the work of the 13th century, later enlarged; inside, the figure of Saint Michael, the village patron, presides over the main altarpiece.

Getting there

Celada del Camino is about twenty-three kilometres south-west of Burgos, beside the A-62 motorway towards Valladolid.