Learning to speak Spanish like a native in underrated Valladolid

No me digas! Or, as they say in the heart of Castile country, you don’t say! Spain resident Peter Barron seeks to become fluent on an immersive course.

“Copia?” asked the barman as I paid for some tapas on Madrid’s Calle de Ponzano. The question was simple – do you need a receipt? – but amid the chatter I didn’t catch it. He switched instantly to lightly accented English. “You wanna copy?” That mildly humiliating exchange summed up why my wife Julia and I were taking the fast train the next morning from Madrid to the heart of old Castile, to Valladolid.

We were going courtesy of a beca, or scholarship, from the Fundación de la Lengua Española, a non-profit enterprise whose aim is to promote the Spanish language, the city of Valladolid and the region of Castilla y León. I say scholarship – in truth anyone with a level of Spanish from absolute beginner to advanced linguist can apply.

It started with group therapy. Our teacher Arantza – tall, dark and Basque – sat on a desk and asked what we hoped to get from the course. None of us was a beginner, but our replies spoke of struggle: miedo (fear), falta de fluidez (lack of fluency), vergüenza (embarrassment). We had come in search of the same thing: to speak and understand Spanish fluently, without fear or embarrassment. English was out. There was just one other Brit and neither the teachers nor the other students – from Belgium, France, Russia and Brazil – spoke to us in anything other than Spanish.

I shared my hang-up: where we have a house, in Extremadura in south-west Spain, people speak famously fast, with a tendency to cut significant parts of their words. Thus “cuidado”, or “take care”, becomes something like “kwow”. The remedy, said Arantza, would be two weeks of immersion in Spanish language and culture, here in the home of pure Castilian. The degree of immersion would be up to us.

Thanks to our scholarship, the four hours of teaching a day – plus optional museum visits and winery tours – were effectively free once we’d paid the €100 (£85) signing-on fee. Throw in a rock-bottom Airbnb with noisy pipes and our outlay for this potentially life-changing fortnight was less than £500 for two.

First, we had a one-hour test of our level: 100 multiple-choice questions, many of which could be described as tricks, dealing with problems such as “Which of the two forms of the verb ‘to be’ is appropriate (my brother is an engineer, but at the moment he is a street sweeper)?”.

I’m not telling you our score, but we managed to clear our first hurdle which was to end up in different classes. Vergüenza and all that.

Emerging into a bright Valladolid afternoon, we were given a guided tour. At first sight, this medium-sized city seems nothing special, and the number of unlet shops in its pedestrianised streets suggests the economic crisis hit it hard. But among the humdrum 20th-century blocks lie beautiful reminders of Spain’s Golden Age.

In the 15th century, Valladolid was the country’s most important city – and in the 17th, briefly, its capital. The Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand married here, giving birth to modern Spain. Christopher Columbus died here and Miguel de Cervantes apparently wrote the first instalment of Don Quixote in a house you can still visit, of which more later.

Valladolid is the ideal place for an immersive language course. Unlike nearby Salamanca, this university city is not overrun with teenage international students, carousing nightly in English. The red-painted Plaza Mayor predates its counterpart in Madrid and has the same Renaissance nobility but there are no caricaturists nor purveyors of huge bubbles.

Crucially, locals are happy to converse in their language. In two weeks, not a single waiter or shop assistant addressed us in English.

We took a seat outside the Lion D’Or café to read about the approaching general election in El Norte de Castilla, the regional paper. Later, walking through the Campo Grande gardens, Julia and I did something we had never done before. We spoke to each other, for a good hour. In Spanish. I noted that the peacocks are los pavos reales, royal turkeys; she explained that the tufted red squirrels are las ardillas, which although red in colour are in all other respects grey. Ser or estar?

Promenades didn’t last. Our visit straddled the beginning of November and the temperature dropped from the last traces of summer to stone-cold Castilian nights. They describe it here as nine months of winter (invierno) and three months of hell (infierno).

The climate has done much to shape Castile’s austere culture, so different from the flamenco and fiesta image of Spain. The arcaded streets around Plaza Mayor were designed to shelter Vallesolitanos, as the city’s inhabitants are known, from the biting winter wind. Bar food leans to warming snacks: with a caña of beer we were served complimentary pots of piping broth.

Elderly couples crowd into the chocolateria El Castillo for cups of hot, thick chocolate dipped with salty churros. The buzz made a challenging backdrop for Spanish conversation practice. Our favourite bar, El Corcho, became the place to round off evenings with creamy croquetas and a glass of excellent local Ribera del Duero at less than a euro.

Possibly due to the climate, Valladolid is also a big cinema venue. The Spanish film we planned to see had sold out, so we settled for Keira Knightley in Secretos de Estado; a good move. In Spain, international films are almost always dubbed into Spanish so the vocabulary of a story we knew (whistleblower, leak, weapons of mass destruction) was a big aid to comprehension.

Back in class, things were hotting up. Having started the course with the deliberate speech of a primary teacher, Arantza reverted to her usual clip and lessons were more challenging. We were played Spanish songs and asked to decipher the lyrics. We discussed TV shows and adverts. We analysed a story by Gabriel García Márquez.

Then we visited the home of the father of the language. Valladolid has few historic houses – centuries of decline and the Civil War saw to that – but in 1912 a wealthy American hispanophile bought the building where Cervantes is said to have lived, and gifted it to the nation.

The casa museo is a very Spanish concept, invented by the Marquis de la Vega Inclán, an early tourism impresario who also launched the paradors, Spain’s network of state-run hotels. Typically, it involves a restored house where a famous person may, or may not, have lived. No documentation shows Cervantes lived in this one, but historians have deduced he did.

Its fittings would have existed in his time: a quill lies in a well on an oak desk. On the walls are quotations from Don Quixote and information on the writer’s life. Almost entirely bogus, but enjoyable nonetheless. By accident or design, the tall, gloomy ticket desk lady and her unkempt, jovial sidekick who showed us around were in character as Quixote and Sancho Panza.

Nearly time for our final project – a five-minute class presentation in Spanish – and to pick up our diplomas. On our last evening, we students dined at the city’s grandest restaurant, La Parrilla de San Lorenzo. Declining the English menu, we chose the Castilian classic lechazo: whole roast suckling lamb, salad, fried potatoes and robust Ribera wine. We bantered with the elderly, white-jacketed waiters and took stock.

Tired but happy, we had made significant progress. I felt a breakthrough in understanding spoken Spanish and while not fluent I had much more confidence. An early test came in our Extremaduran village at an ibérico jamón festival. As I admired the carving contest, a TV reporter asked where I was from. “Londres, Inglaterra.”

“No me digas!” he exclaimed, adding we had to do a live interview. “Ok en Español?” he asked as the mic approached. I had a second or two to think. “Venga,” I said. Bring it on.

Peter Barron is an author of Frommer’s Spain 2019.

How to do it

AVE high-speed train from Chamartin, Madrid in about an hour (€30; renfe.com).

Scholarships worth €500 from Fundación de la Lengua Española, Valladolid (fundacionlengua.com).

What to see

National Sculpture Museum’s polychrome work (Calle Cadenas de San Gregorio 1; €3); Museo Patio Herreriano has contemporary art in a restored monastery (Calle Jorge Guillén 6; free); Casa de Cervantes (€3; Calle Rastro; info.valladolid.es).

Eat and drink

Parrilla de San Lorenzo restaurant (Calle Pedro Niño 1). For winery visits, bodegas Hiriart, Muelas and La Sorbona.

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