The Duero River: from source to sea - art, architecture and gastronomy alongside Iberia's greatest river

The Camino de Santiago is famous and well-peopled, but across the Iberian landmass nature has carved its own pilgrimage routes, along whose river banks civilisations have built their cities and (often rarely-visited) towns.

The great philosopher Miguel de Unamuno celebrated a joint Iberian culture that he saw as the communal backbone of Portugal and Spain; the Duero acting like a Cervantine girdle holding together the exoticism of Oporto, the first circumnavigation of the world, the spice trade, the sounds of Brazil, the Habaneras of Cuba, and the bracing austerity of Soria where the Duero’s source bursts out of a mossy mountain wall in the Picos de Urbión.

Gustavo Bécquer (Spain’s Byron) fell in love with a Soria that fed his wild imagination. For Antonio Machado, Spain’s greatest poet of the twentieth century, Soria and the Duero were at the heart of his Spain; spiritual, sad, contemplative, yet finally uplifting and healing. From Soria’s poplar-lined walk below the churches of San Polo and San Saturio and the Mountain of Souls, we dig deeper and deeper into Spanish history. Just a few miles away archeologists have uncovered the mythic Numancia, the siege city that fell to Rome and has become the Ur city of Spanish survival and re-birth. The treasures, staggeringly beautiful in their simplicity, like pared-back works by Miró or Moore – fossilised, white, bony and resistant – are on display in Soria’s beautiful but barely visited museums.

This is not a dry pilgrimage into Iberia’s historical past. Downstream we cut through the Ribera del Duero wine region to taste masterpieces of the oenological arts and feast on wild mushrooms, roasted lamb, and fresh-to-table vegetables cooked by Michelin-starred chefs. Our home for two days on the river bank, with its curated medieval herb gardens and shaded river walks, is at the Abadía Retuerta, in the heart of its celebrated bodega producing some of the greatest wines in Spain. 

En route we visit three of the greatest pre-Romanesque churches in Europe, Gothic cathedrals, palaces and the quixotic Bourbon Enlightenment project of the Canal de Castilla. Arguably the greatest set of medieval tapestries ever produced are on view in Zamora. Toro promises a monumental polychrome early Gothic sculpted door, perfectly preserved.

For centuries all below the Duero – extrema duero – lay the Caliphate of Córdoba, the mythic Al-Andalus. In Tordesillas, Queen Juana the Mad was incarcerated for more than 40 years in a convent whose severe white-washed walls have recently uncovered an Arab palace fit for a Caliph or a King. If the Duero was the border, it was in Tordesillas that Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century celebrated the ultimate carve up, as with Papal dispensation they split the world in two.  

Crossing the border into Portugal, we feast along the Douro, crossing the Duke of Wellington’s vast estates. We end in Porto, reading our way through flights of its glorious red wine, and venturing out onto its delta in an old Rabelo boat to dream of new worlds.