AS photographed at night from a satellite, or the International Space Station (ISS), the Iberian Peninsula looks encrusted with lights along its coastal edges. Madrid forms a big pulsing cluster near the centre, while surrounding hinterlands only seem to show in those images as something of a void. Ever-fewer people live out in Castile y León and Extremadura, the two adjoining regions that cover much of what is known as La España Vacia, or “The Empty Spain”.
Not many visit either, or at least not compared to Barcelona and other glowing nodes of the tourist circuit. So, while the big ports and resorts struggle to manage surplus holidaymakers, there is room for plenty more out west toward the Portuguese border. Some have been following the stars that way lately, under the auspices of an astrotourism initiative called Buenas Noches.
A route map plotted point-to-point between optimal stargazing sites leads to distant outposts like La Siberia (so-called because it felt so remote to workers who laid down the first roads and railways in these parts), and the Corral de los Lobos, an ancient stone enclosure on a lonely hilltop, built to trap wolves when they far outnumbered the farmers and shepherds around here.
The latter also lies in one of the rainier reaches of the Spanish interior, and the weather has mostly closed over the night sky when I go up to look. But even through breaks in the clouds, I can see the ISS pass in its elliptical orbit. Beyond that, Jupiter. And, much further out, the Milky Way. “Big region, small population, almost no light pollution,” says forestry engineer and nature guide Alberto Garzón Fernández the next day, on a misty hike through La Garganta de los Infiernos, a biosphere reserve named for the fearsome sound of water through its gorges.
No other forms of pollution either, it seems. We look down into gigantic cauldrons of granite
known as marmitas, where the River Jerte swirls like soup in a pot around rock eroded smooth as brushed steel. The lichen across the wet surface is a luminous green, which Garzón calls “a bio-indicator of clean air.” “Extremadura is, no doubt, the most natural and healthy place to live.”
His claim extends to non-human natives, not least the birds, and he points skyward to the ghost profiles of honey buzzards and griffon vultures floating in the vapour off the peaks above. Thanks to “sound management” as he puts it, the Spanish imperial eagle is now seen in much healthier numbers up there. The Iberian lynx population, meanwhile, is climbing steadily from dangerous lows of a few decades ago in neighbouring Monfragüe National Park, where Garzón was born and raised. And the Iberian wolf – hunted and displaced almost to extinction before recent, belated protections – has been making a comeback over the flanking Gredos mountains.
That’s close enough for their howls to be heard again from the Corral de los Lobos, on those same clear nights when “the stars look so close you could touch them,” says Garzón. The return of these signature species gives him hope for our own. “To me, they represent our capacity to do things right, but we so often wait until the last minute.”
If his domain has felt the benefit of a minimal human presence lately, it’s hardly untouched by the growing hazards of the moment. Last summer’s heatwave-borne wildfires burned through 20,000 hectares of the Jerte Valley’s famous cherry orchards. All that damage is bound to darken the coming springtime cherry blossom season and the harvest to follow – one of the few events to draw a crowd to this area. “It will still be beautiful,” says Sara Cudero Morcuende at Alimentacion Sara, a grocery store in the nearby mountain town of Valverde de la Vera.
Her shop is so well-stocked with local delicacies that the place would make a killing if transplanted to, say, Hackney Wick: figs and olives from surrounding groves, sweet and hot paprika dried over open fires, all sorts of cherry jams and liqueurs. But her town, like many others in the region, has lost thousands of residents in recent years.
There’s a gothic-romantic hush to the cobbled streets below its ruined and overgrown castle, broken only by a PA system mounted in the main square, announcing newborn puppies up for adoption. The quietude, the quasi-abandonment, may yet enhance the appeal to those passing through, though it can’t be good for local business. “A few more customers would be nice,” says Sara, but otherwise the town has only a couple of tapas bars, a few guest houses, and no hotel.
For my part, I make use of Spain’s state-owned Parador network, which tends to offer surprisingly affordable rooms in converted convents and palaces, mostly within the medieval walls of the nearest comparatively big cities. Provincial capital Cáceres, and Trujillo, with its dreamlike mountaintop fortress, and Plasencia, with its two half-cathedrals (one never fully demolished, the other forever unfinished), make good, solid bases for deeper forays into rural Extremadura and Castile y León.
Fun fact: there are more pigs than people in these regions, including the black acorn-fed pigs of the dehesa forest, whose meat becomes the world-renowned jamón ibérico. Including, too, the very chonky fellow I encounter in La Alberca, enjoying a siesta in a sty that is also a kind of shrine. Abiding custom dictates that a single fat pig be allowed to wander and eat at his leisure for months of each year, until he’s raffled off for the feast of San Anton. In the past that porker was invariably eaten, but some recent winners have apparently kept him as a pet.
The town is also known for its gorgeous three-story houses with half-timber facades, another legacy of Christian settlers from Burgundy, who came to occupy territory reconquered from the Moors 1000 years ago. The encircling mountains are called the Sierra de Francia for that reason, their slopes thick with oak forests that yield many fine species of mushroom.
“You can eat them all,” says biologist and guide Marino Esteban, on a walk through woods that really do look more like French or even English countryside. “But some you can only eat once.” This is his way of saying that certain types are toxic, and resulting fatalities are legend in these parts. This is also to say that a massive meal at Meson de San Martín – a stonebuilt tavern that seems the only place open in nearby village San Martín del Castañar – is not all about the ham.
There’s plenty of that, but also those freshly-picked penny bun mushrooms grilled with garlic salt and olive oil, not to mention the chestnuts, cheeses, tomatoes and potatoes of surrounding farmlands, and the red wine made from native Rufete grapes, which is just as good as anything I’ve tried from more domineering production regions like La Rioja and Ribera del Duero.
And here’s the big secret I learn on this little road trip: you can often eat and drink better, and cheaper, in the so-called “Empty Spain” than in most of the busier quarters. This was one of the great lunches of my life, I tell the cheery, friendly chef Alfonso Buenaventura. His wife and
co-owner Belén answers for him: “Of course it was.”
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