Reigns in SPAIN
Monument-filled, tourist-empty Extremadura is a Spanish gem,
The flamenco strains were so haunting that I asked the quintet of 20-somethings playing guitars on the doorstep of a massive, whitewashed centuries-old church if I could listen for a spell.
“Sure. Want a sip?” one replied, offering the litrona — a quarter-gallon bottle of beer — they were sharing. Then they went back to jamming, their notes echoing up the steep, narrow lane in one of the most monument-filled, tourist-empty cities in the Iberian peninsula.
Caceres is a highlight of Extremadura, a Spanish region of vast sun-parched landscapes and untouched historical jewels exactly halfway between the evermore-crowded capitals of Madrid and Lisbon, Portugal.
I spent a weekend there exploring Roman ruins and climbing up medieval towers without seeing one tour group.
I travelled mostly on comfortable public buses that rolled through olive and oak tree-studded hills, past fortified towns and palm-fringed farms, stopping to pick up schoolchildren returning home and elderly couples going to market.
Every stop appealed — especially Trujillo with its castle — but I focused on three must-sees: Merida, Caceres and Guadalupe.
IMPERIAL POWER
This small city played a role in two of the world’s great empires, Rome’s and Spain’s.
As their provincial capital, Romans filled Merida with public and private showpieces. Centuries later, many of the conquistadores that led Spain’s dominion in the Americas came from this region.
Just across the two-millennia-old, halfmile river bridge, stand a couple of monuments dedicated to Merida by Rome and by its namesake city in Yucatan, Mexico. Next to the monuments, in a fortress built by a ninth century emir, I descended the steps of a water cistern decorated with Roman and Visigoth marble panels and carvings of leaves and grapes. Just past the bright-red bullfighting arena, in the Roman Casa del Mitreo, I marvelled at the bright turquoise sea depicted in a 2000-year-old floor mosaic representing the cosmos, including a sun figure with a crown of rays exactly like the Statue of Liberty.
There is a Circus Maximus so gigantic you can imagine thousands of spectators roaring as chariots sped down the straight. But what took my breath away was the Roman Theatre, its stage wall decorated with exquisitely detailed floral elements and veined marble columns.
In the pedestrianised streets of the workaday downtown, I found the Augustus-era Temple of Diana, its huge colonnade framing a porticoed Renaissance palace — two empires literally fused.
GOLD TREASURE
Caceres’ strawberry-gold walled monumental core hugs a hilltop, with hardly a single modern element among slender medieval towers and Renaissance palaces covered in coats of arms.
It looks perfect enough for a movie set, but still feels real — I watched a nun in a white habit and a briefcase hurry under a stone arch, not a selfie stick in sight.
In Plaza de San Mateo, where a crested tower and a bell tower jostle for height, I chatted about US presidential politics through a convent turnstile with the Kenyan sister selling me almond cookies.
Places to visit include the Santa Maria cathedral, full of conquistador tombs, around the corner from the ToledoMoctezuma palace built by a mixed localAztec family, and the Casa de las Veletas museum, with an arch-lined Arabic aljibe (cistern). But I found it hard to stop making laps up and down the entire town, following the sun as it marched across stern yet sumptuous facades, revealing sculpted stone details like grimacing gargoyles, lions holding an escutcheon, and a puffy-cheeked sun itself.
Fortified by wild boar tapas and shots of local bellota liquor — made from the same acorns eaten by pigs that end up as Iberia’s best hams — I kept wandering into the night. My steps and those flamenco melodies were the only sounds in floodlit cobblestone alleys.