Day Five begins gently enough - coffee in Burgos, a cooler morning, and a table of pilgrims lacing their boots for the Camino de Santiago. Some will sleep rough, some in hotels, and one husband will trail his wife by car - devotion on four wheels. Before heading south, there’s time for the Museo de la Evolución Humana, Burgos’ quiet triumph. Inside, a film loops the unravelling of the natural world - ice melting, forests thinning, species winking out. It’s a reminder that we have always travelled; only the speed and the cost have changed. 

Burgos feels chill indoors, thanks to air-conditioning that cools people and warms the planet. The city advertises biodiversity on every poster, but its grass is brittle and its fountains anxious. Fine words don’t water soil. By the time I rejoin the autoroute, gantries warn EXTREME FIRE RISK, Spain’s summer uniform now. The fields are cut bare, the sunflowers blackened, the vines patient. 

Spain feels less manicured than France, more human somehow. A few irrigation rigs stand idle, one sprays defiantly. Wind turbines tilt into the south-west wind, most spinning. Solar panels, though, are rare - the land rich in light but poor in policy. In one field, a solitary tree remains uncut, a small act of grace in a brown expanse. Above, buzzards circle, unhurried.

Traffic tells its own tale - freight, vans, single-driver cars, and the odd transporter stacked with brand-new vehicles - fuel spent delivering future fuel users. Vineyards swaddle saplings in plastic guards - even our good intentions are petroleum-wrapped. The rockfall nets and bolted cliffs remind me that roads don’t cross landscapes so much as carve through them, defended from the very earth they disturb. 

Then the Meseta opens - a plateau broad and parched, the colour of bone. Desertification here isn’t theory. it’s a view. Yet reservoirs glint nearly full of recent rains, windsurfers sketching bright lines across their surfaces. Even in drought country, nature still throws the occasional reprieve. Cattle graze on thin pickings, the ruminant economy unhurried by centuries. 

At Tres Cantos, fire has licked up to homes and offices. Charred walls, a faint tang of ash, and already the first green shoots. Nature, refusing to concede. I brush soot onto my trousers - the day’s unofficial badge. By Madrid, the temperature has climbed to 28 °C, a vertical mile lower, a different climate entirely. The capital declares its low-emission zone with tidy signage, though the traffic along Gran Vía seems to ignore it by sheer momentum. The parks look thirsty, the tourists well-watered. 

On the approach, a quarry bites into a hillside, feeding the city’s endless appetite for stone and sand. Every metropolis is a wound in the landscape - we don’t just visit places, we quarry them into being. 

So ends Day Five: pilgrims and Pleistocene bones, turbines and firelines, plastic guards and patient cattle, full reservoirs and exhausted soil. A short drive, but one that says plenty. 

Why listen?
Because it’s a road trip seen through unvarnished eyes - a slow crossing of a continent wrestling with climate change. It’s not about destinations but connections, between pilgrims and drivers, turbines and quarries, the comfort of air-conditioning and the cost it hides. It’s travel as witness, not escape. 

Why not listen?
If you prefer your journeys smooth and sunny, free of smoke, mildew, and contradiction, perhaps steer clear. This episode won’t soothe you; it will make you notice. But for those who still believe that looking closely matters, that noticing is the first step towards change, Day Five is worth the miles.