The Spanish region that time forgot
Flying from London to Madrid, you have a sense of being bracketed by Richard Rogers. Heathrow’s Terminal 5 is not, perhaps, his masterpiece, but works well enough. Meanwhile, Madrid’s Barajas... well, let’s just say the Spanish did better in this particular bargain with this particular architect. It really is one of the loveliest airports in the world. A trial to navigate, but a special place to be nonetheless.
Anyway, my ultimate destination was Trujillo, a small town in Extremadura, about 120 or so miles (200km) south-west of Madrid. Extremadura was described by one 19th-century traveller as “the Hampshire of Spain”. This, to me, suggests that Hampshire must have changed rather dramatically in the intervening years. The thing about Extremadura, then as now, is that it is very little visited either by the Spanish or by foreigners.
Once out of the capital, the Madrid-Badajoz autovia, the main road to Portugal, is well-made and quiet en route to Trujillo, where a dusty Don Quixote once tilted at his windmills. The route notes say that the Almaraz Tunnel means I am getting close, and soon I speed down its rifled tubes. The weapon metaphor is appropriate: this is Peninsular War country.
Off the motorway and into the little town itself, I pass through nondescript outskirts and steer the car up a hill to the medieval pinnacle, the casco antiguo. In 1947, Sacheverell Sitwell visited and found, dismayingly, a “cone of decaying masonry”. Here Sitwell saw people starving in hovels, poor even by Spanish standards.
In one Victorian etymology, the word Spain was derived from the Greek for “poverty”. Now, Trujillo’s casco antiguo has been painstakingly rebuilt.
Still, the casco antiguo roads were not built for modern Europcar and are quite astonishingly narrow. A first gear scrabble and then, when you think it cannot get any narrower, it gets narrower still. And here I was: not quite stuck, but surely soon. I closed my eyes, folded in the rear-view mirrors and let sounds alone determine the track and speed of scurrying progress.
I got there and, turning off the engine to let it cool, marvelled that the reward of a complete lack of parking restrictions was a nice reminder of medieval simplicity.
I was staying in the Villa Martires, essentially a medieval fortified building with Roman origins, an alcazaba, but turned into rubble by the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. It too was rebuilt (by an English family with two Popes in its tree) in the Nineties. This tells you something about the lack of urgency felt hereabout: two-and-a-half centuries of neglect followed by a spurt of activity.
Villa Martires is a part of what in Italy would be called an albergo diffuso, except this small handful of distinct rental properties does not share any formal hotel functions. From outside, the aspect is dominated by severe masonry. There are few windows on account of (a) the ferocious sun and (b) the only shallowly repressed memories of rapacious Moors with knives clenched between their teeth.
Inside, the appointments are grand, the spaces regal, if incongruous. There was a ceremonial staircase, and both formal and informal drawing rooms. The decorations were pure Hampshire country house, by which I mean lying at the pompous end of the antique trade with recent portraits, a mite too glossy, and over-restored older ones. The lavatories reminded me of The Hurlingham Club: striped wallpaper and bibelots, Home Counties chic. Villa Martires, you conclude, is an English conception of Spain.
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The view that unfolds before you here is the dehesa, the sparse, almost barren, pasture with oaks and olives and cork, and the celebrated pigs that feed off them. Once a Roman granary, by the 19th century the dehesa was abandoned to sheep, locusts and those snuffling swine.
High up on Martires’ terrace with its enthralling view, this sense of isolation is reinforced. You take in some darting swifts, Roman ruins and a distant view of Portugal.
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Next door to Villa Martires is Francisco Pizarro’s old house, now a charmingly amateurish museum. Extremadura, you see, was the home of the Conquistadors. Pizarro, a roughneck, was given a royal licence to invade Peru. Francisco de Orellana, who navigated the Amazon looking for El Dorado, also came from Trujillo. Stout Hernán Cortés was from Medellin, not too far away. What demons drove them from this quiet, tranquil place? If ever you wanted to come up with a rationale about hardship being a stimulus to creativity, historic Trujillo provides it. Myths about the Amazons begun here. Before John Keats wrote “Much have I travelled in the realm of gold”, Pizarro, an illiterate gambler and brawler, was travelling in a realm of gold in his head. Then off he went.
At the Temple of the Sun in Cuzco, he found himself in the presence of life-size golden statues of the Incas and a garden of golden fruit and flowers. These things, one imagines, make an impression. Humbled, he and his colleagues brought the cactus and chilli peppers back from South America to Europe. But pigs are the thing around here. This is Spain’s ham country. Indeed, Pizarro was the son of a swineherd, rather than a more high-born hidalgo. The villages around Trujillo were, until recently, not much more than coalitions of pigsties.
Some pig connoisseurship for you: the serrano are the white pigs, the common porcine population; the Iberico the pata negra, or black foot, comprising the precious and more delicate minority. The finest ham is Jamon Iberico Puro de Bellota, fed entirely in acorns, “bellota” being, via Arabic, the Spanish word for the oak nut. Don Quixote, no less, preached to the goatherds about the acorn being the basis of all cooking.
Montanara is the beautiful name of the acorn-dropping season, which lasts from October and March (and this is the time to come; the region is far too hot for tourists in high summer). By the time the pigs have done two montanaras, they weigh about 360lb. They are then butchered and the hams spend a year-and-a-half in a curing cellar. Jamon noses (and such things exist in Trujillo) can detect about a hundred distinct aromas in premium ham.
There is one indisputably good restaurant in Trujillo, and a larger number of indisputably bad ones. The good one is Corral del Rey in the Plaza Mayor where the chef-patron is Antonio Sanchez Garcia-Plaza. On my first night, a worried-looking waitress passed us a €25 (£22) menu. I ate salmorejo and aguacate con gambas (avocado with prawns) followed by chargrilled octopus and a piece of ternero (veal) over whose cuisson we had some futile discussion. (Salmorejo is a version of the more familiar gazpacho, from the Arabic “soaked bread”.) I skipped the postres and went for hard cheese instead. And it was all so good, I returned on most subsequent nights. One alternative to Corral del Rey is Restaurante Alberca, but its views aren’t as good; or there’s Bizcocho, which has a commanding view of the Plaza Mayor from its arcaded terrace but is let down a little by its food. Of course, should you prefer to remain close to your bed, eating in Villa Martires is also easy and, given the mad proliferation of outdoor dining tables, plus the view, a continuously tempting option.
The town is full of little shops with canopies saying “Embutidos, Jamones, Quesos, Pan, Vino”. Or an A-board with “Degustacion gratuita. Top-Ten Quesos Extremenos”. I stock up on La Retorta sheep’s cheese made by Finca Pascualete since 1232, plus fresh chorizo stiff with La Vera pimenton. There are no remarkable local wines, but the strong tastes of cheese and sausage make refinement redundant. Besides, the unremarkable ones are perfectly drinkable. or so I found.
Sitting in the vast and majestic Plaza Mayor with a coffee or a beer, the daily occupation was wondering “Why does this Renaissance square not look Italian?” A certain coarseness in the details was the answer. It could not be anything other than Spanish. Here on a Thursday the big farmers’ market is “El Jueves”. Or there is, by way of contrast in charm, Leclerc. Old Trujillo cedes to the new on the walk to the supermarket. It must be admitted that old is prettier than new.
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You could not say that the vistas of Trujillo are barren, but nor is this land especially fertile. There are not even traditional country noises such as strimmers, tractors and aircraft. The new EU-funded autopista to the nearby university town of Caceres was absolutely empty when I cast my eyes across it. No car moved. No lights made tracks in the darkness. No sound travelled over the scrub. No towns were in sight. The nearest mountain was 60 miles (100km) distant.
This is a strange, remote place. And if it is haunted, pleasantly so. You do sense that South America is the next stop. Indeed, Peru’s third city on South America’s west coast is called Trujillo. But how very different the mentality of the rough and swaggering Conquistadors to the pious and quaking Puritans who established the English on the east coast of what became the United States. The spirit of Extremadura, you feel, travelled with Pizarro to Peru all those years ago. But what remains is magical.
Getting there
Air Europa (aireuropa.com), British Airways (ba.com), easyJet (easyjet.com), Iberia (iberia.com), Norwegian (norwegian.com) and Ryanair (ryanair.com) fly from assorted UK airports to Madrid, which provides the best access to the region.
Staying there
Villa Martires sleeps four people and costs £4,500 for a seven-night stay. It is available exclusively through Trujillo Villas Espana (trujillovillasespana.com).
Eating there
Corral del Rey, 2 Plaza Mayor, Trujillo (corraldelreytrujillo.com)
Restaurante Alberca, calle Victoria 8, Trujillo (00 34 927 322 209)
Bizcocho, Plaza Mayor 91, Trujillo (restaurantebizcochotrujillo.com)
