Extremadura Travel Guide

This ruggedly beautiful expanse of southwestern Spain is the country’s least developed and least visited region. Extremadura probably means “the land beyond the river Duero,” and for hundreds of years it was the depopulated buffer zone between the Christian north and Muslim south. A millennium later, the impact of that era still resonates. Locals like to point out that in Spanish the name Extremadura also means “extreme” and “hard.” The tough way of life, forged in a sometimes-inhospitable climate, has shaped their history.

This remote region extends from the Gredos and Gata mountain ranges (pictured0 all the way south to Andalusia, and from Castile west to the Portuguese frontier. Spanish Extremadura (not to be confused with the Portuguese province of Extremadura) includes the provinces of Badajoz and Cáceres, and has a varied landscape of plains and mountains, meadows with holm and cork oaks, and fields of stone and lime.

The world knows Extremadura as the land of the conquistadors (see why below). Famous sons include Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro, who conquered the Aztecs and the Incas in the 16^th century. The riches they sent home from the New World financed lavish palaces and churches that stand today as monuments to Spain’s imperial age. The wonderfully preserved cities of Cáceres and Trujillo bring that history to life, while Mérida has some of Europe’s most complete Roman ruins.

Extremadura also has an abundance of unspoiled nature—mountains, river gorges, and the rolling, oak-forested dehesa where the famous black pigs roam. The region’s acorn-fed Jamón Ibérico is prized the world over. Its wildlife—especially an exquisite bird population including eagles, vultures, and storks—attracts international acclaim too. Yet tourism remains refreshingly undeveloped, and less English is spoken here than in the main visitor areas. Because Extremadura’s summers get intensely hot, spring and fall are the best times to visit.

Why Extremadura Was Home to So Many Conquistadores

In the 16th century, tens of thousands of young men left the villages of Extremadura to seek their fortune in the New World. The most famous were Hernán Cortés (from Medellín) and Francisco Pizarro (from Trujillo), who conquered Mexico and Peru respectively. Vasco Núñez de Balboa, who sighted the Pacific; Hernando de Soto, who crossed the Mississippi; and Francisco de Orellana, who navigated the Amazon, all came from the region.

The conquistadors left Extremadura because they couldn’t scratch a living in the harsh land of their birth. Farmers were burdened by high taxes and beholden to feudal lords who had been granted huge estates (latifundias) after the Reconquest. The younger sons of wealthy families, blocked from inheriting, saw emigration as their best opportunity.

Owing to their ruthless conquests, the names of Extremaduran villages are sprinkled across the Americas—among them Albuquerque (New Mexico), Mérida (Mexico), Medellín (Colombia), and Trujillo (Peru).

Most conquistadors died in the New World, but some returned with great riches to build magnificent palaces and monuments, many of which still stand. Bernal Díaz de Castillo, who claimed to have fought 119 battles with Cortés in Mexico, was candid: “We came here to serve God and the king,” he wrote, “and to get rich.”