Camping in Burgos: Gothic cathedral, prehistory and frontier nature
Burgos brings together in a single province some of the most distinctive attractions in Castile and León. The capital is a city of manageable size with a Gothic cathedral declared a World Heritage Site which, together with those of León and Toledo, forms the triad of Hispanic Gothic. But the province stretches north to the Merindades, east to the moorlands of La Bureba and south to the Sierra de la Demanda, and in every direction there is something different to discover.
The Río Lobos Canyon, on the border with Soria, is one of the most spectacular natural parks on the plateau. Over millennia the river has carved a gorge of white limestone walls where colonies of griffon vultures nest and where the Templar chapel of San Bartolomé appears in the middle of the defile as if taken from a medieval novel. The path that runs through it is accessible and very rewarding. In the far north, the Merindades are an area of green mountains with waterfalls such as Peñas Pardas, caves with Palaeolithic cave paintings and valleys that seem more Cantabrian than Castilian.
Atapuerca is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world. The remains found in the sierra of the same name, a few kilometres from Burgos, include the oldest hominids in western Europe, more than 800,000 years old. The Museum of Human Evolution in the capital is impressive and worth several hours of your visit. The Sierra de la Demanda, to the south, has beech and oak forests, the mountain resort of Pineda de la Sierra and the Yecla gorge, a narrow slot between limestone rocks that takes twenty minutes to walk through but is not easily forgotten.
The monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos, with its two-storey Romanesque cloister regarded as one of the masterpieces of Spanish medieval art and its Benedictine monks who still sing Gregorian chant, lies south of the capital and merits a detour. Campsites in Burgos are unevenly distributed: more concentrated around the sierra and the canyon, with fewer options on the central plain. The busiest season is summer, although spring and autumn have very pleasant light and temperatures for exploring the province. Burgos black pudding, roast lamb, olla podrida and the wines of Ribera del Duero and the young Arlanza DO are the flavours that define the Burgos table.
