Hail the conquistador heroes

Paul Canham tours Extremadura, home to the Spanish explorers who conquered the New World

When James Pembroke, The Oldie’s publisher, asked Dawn and me to lead an Oldie trip to central Spain, we leapt at the chance.

It would it be our 40th trip with The Oldie and coincide with our 40th wedding anniversary. It was also an opportunity to introduce fellow oldies to a part of central Spain that remains largely unknown and unvisited.

Extremadura generated an exceptional number of conquistadors –the explorer soldiers of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. They were usually the younger sons of minor nobility with few prospects at home. The discovery of the New World offered opportunities for adventure, fame and fortune.

With these conquistadors, Extremadura briefly took its place on the world stage in the first half of the 16th century. Many local place names are more familiar to us as the names of Latin American towns.

Extremaduran explorers and adventurers are credited with the establishment of 20 American countries.

Vasco Núñez de Balboa, one conquistador, crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, to become the first European to look out on the Pacific Ocean from the East.

Between 1519 and 1521, Hernán Cortés led the conquest of Mexico and the destruction of the Aztec Empire. He inspired Keats’s lines in On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer:

Or like stout Cortez [sic] when with eagle eyes

He stared at the Pacific – and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Darien refers to Darién Province in Panama.

Between 1524 and 1532, another conquistador, Francisco Pizarro, explored and then conquered Peru and destroyed the Inca Empire.

At around the same time, Pedro de Alvarado conquered much of Central America, including Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. In 1542, Francisco de Orellana explored the length of the Amazon, from its source in the Andes. Between 1539 and his death in 1542, Hernando de Soto was the first European to explore deep into the territory of today’s United States: through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Louisiana. He was the first European to cross the Mississippi.

The conquest and exploitation of the New World led to the export of vast quantities of gold and silver to Spain over the next 100 years.

The conquistadors’ greatest, if unintended, contribution was the introduction of new food groups into the European diet: chocolate, potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, beans and squashes. And tobacco, too.

Extremadura borders Portugal to the west, Castile-La Mancha to the East, Castile-Leon to the North and Andalusia to the South. It has the two largest provinces in Spain; Cáceres in the north and Badajoz to the south.

Spain’s poorest region, with one of the country’s lowest population densities, it remains largely unspoilt. It’s famous for the dehesa – semi-forested areas of well-spaced holm and cork oak, intermingled with wild grasses. It is home to the pata negra, the black-foot pig, which feeds on the acorns. It’s the source of the finest ham in the world, jamón ibérico de bellota, while La Vera produces the fragrant Spanish paprika, pimentón de la Vera

For almost 500 years, the Arabs ruled here. The name Extremadura comes from the Latin extrema Durii –beyond the Douro river. It was the name given by the Christians to that area held by Christian forces at any particular time, its boundaries shifting with the fortune of war.

Among the loveliest of its towns is Jarandilla de la Vera. There, following his 1556 abdication, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, briefly made his home before, exhausted and goutridden, he retired to the nearby monastery at Yuste.

Hervás, a small town on the banks of the River Ambroz, sprang up around a 12th-century shrine, the Santihervás, built by the Knights Templar. A magnet for Jewish families fleeing persecution, it has the best preserved judería in Spain.

Trujillo, with its old city standing on a rocky hump in the plains of Extremadura, was occupied by the Romans and Visigoths. Then ruled by the Arabs for over five centuries, it was the birthplace of Diego García de Paredes (1466-1533) – ‘the Samson of Extremadura’, a warrior of legendary strength. According to Cervantes, he could stop a rolling millstone with one finger.

Lying at the terminus of the old Ruta de la Plata is Mérida, or Emerita Augustus to the Romans. It was founded by Emperor Augustus in 25 BC to resettle ‘emeritus’ legionaries, honourably discharged at the end of the Cantabrian Wars.

Capital of the Roman province of Lusitania – and now capital of Extremadura – it has the best preserved and most extensive Roman ruins in Spain. They include the Puente Romano, the longest Roman bridge that survives anywhere.

Founded by the Romans and razed to the ground by the Visigoths, Cáceres was recolonised by the Arabs in the 12th century, falling to Alfonso IX of León in 1229. Its old town is a mix of Arab, Christian, medieval and

Renaissance architectural styles. It includes a palace built by the grandson of the Aztec Emperor Montezuma.

The spiritual centre of Extremadura was – and remains – the shrine of Guadalupe with its Black Madonna, found within the Monastario Real de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. This Romanesque sculpture, carved in cedar wood, dates from the 12th century.

It was here in 1492 that the Reyes Catolicos, Isabelle I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, who completed the Reconquest, signed the documents authorising Christopher Columbus to find a westerly trade route to the Indies.

The first city built in what became Extremadura was Plasencia, founded by Alfonso VIII of Castile in 1186. In 1196, it had the unique distinction of being captured by the Arabs and recaptured by Alfonso on the same day. Situated on the banks of the Jerte river, Plasencia is strategically located along the Ruta de la Plata.

It has two conjoined cathedrals, the result of delayed construction and changing architectural styles. The original Romanesque cathedral was started in 1190. Then, in 1498, it was decided to build a new Gothic cathedral on the same site, destroying the old cathedral as work progressed. It progressed slowly – so, by the 16th century, Renaissance elements were being added.

Work was eventually abandoned in the 18th century, with only the transept and sanctuary of the New Cathedral completed. Though under the same roof, the two half-cathedrals are separate – an eclectic mix of architectural styles.

It’s surprising, considering what came later, that there was huge tolerance for Muslim and Jewish subjects in Castile during much of the medieval period. At the end of the 13th century, the Charter of Plasencia was created, confirming the peaceful co-existence of the Christian, Muslim and Jewish populations within the city.

It is the birthplace of Inés Suárez, the first of a small band of conquistadoras who with her lover Pedro de Valdivia conquered and held Chile for the Spanish Crown.

Today, Extremadura is a geopolitical backwater once more. But change is coming to this rugged and unspoilt region. Solar farms are springing up. Lithium crystals have been found: the people of Cáceres are fighting plans to build a mine (and a giant Buddha) on a nearby hill.

Drought has already come and for two years has devastated the dehesa. Water levels run low in the Vera valley, threatening the pimentón crop; the livelihoods of farmers and livestock owners are threatened.

There is an Extremaduran saying, ‘Cáceres is the head, Trujillo is the heart, Plasencia sheds no tears, Coria speaks no words.’

We visited the head and stayed in the heart. I didn’t cry when I left Plasencia. And I haven’t written about Coria because it wasn’t on our itinerary. Perhaps next time.