Retuerta hotels collection

In Castilian, a retuerta is a bend in a river, and the Duero makes slow ones here, between poplars, beneath the limestone rim of the páramo. Premonstratensian canons from France settled here in the Middle Ages, their first house in Spain, and grew vines on the river's stony terraces. Umbrella pines hold the sand of the slopes; their pine nuts are gathered in winter. Upstream, Peñafiel stretches a narrow, ship-shaped castle along a ridge, above cellars dug into the hill; their air vents, the zarceras, rise out of the grass like boundary stones.