Majadas

The first light catches on a thousand cork oaks, each trunk striped like a zebra where the bark was harvested last summer. At 264 metres above the Campo Arañuelo plain, Majadas wakes before the sun climbs high enough to make the granite houses hum with stored heat. A tractor coughs into life somewhere beyond the church tower; swifts knife through the air above Plaza de España; an elderly man in a beret unhooks the metal shutter of Bar California with the same measured rhythm his father used. This is not a village that performs for visitors – it simply continues, and you are welcome to walk beside its breathing.

Granite, Cork and Sky

Majadas’ streets refuse to prettify themselves. Walls are the colour of winter wheat, some freshly limed, others carrying the bruised patina of decades. Doorways are sized for ox-carts, not SUVs, and every second arch reveals a corral where goats still shuffle at dusk. The parish church of San Pedro Apóstol squats at the centre like a blunt fortress: Romanesque bones, Baroque afterthoughts, a bell that rings the agricultural hours rather than the canonical ones. Step inside and the temperature drops ten degrees; the air smells of candle wax and the rosemary branches left by the last wedding. No ticket desk, no audioguide – just a printed card asking for one euro towards roof repairs and a hand-written note recording that the last baptism was María, weight 3.2 kg, parents delighted.

Walk east for five minutes and the houses thin out. Suddenly you are in the dehesa, the Mediterranean savannah that pays the bills here. Holm oaks spread their limbs like elderly dancers, acorns crunch underfoot, and the horizon is so wide it feels nautical. This is working woodland: every ten years the cork is stripped, pigs arrive each autumn to fatten on acorns, and the clearings rotate between cereal and fallow. Public footpaths are marked by rust-coloured posts, but the real map is understood by the ranchers who can read a cow’s mood in the flick of an ear. Follow the track towards the abandoned cortijo of Los Llanos and you will pass a stone basin fed by a natural spring – still used by shepherds, still covered with nettles in summer.

Heat, Hams and the Right Time for Soup

British notions of mealtimes collapse here. Breakfast happens twice: first at dawn with coffee and yesterday’s bread, again at eleven when the bars fill with men in camouflage discussing wild-boar quotas. Lunch is 15.00, minimum three courses, wine included for €12. By 17.00 the village is shuttered; even the dogs seek shade under the municipal benches. The only place open is the bakery, and only because the oven takes three hours to cool. Return at 20.00 and the temperature is still 34 °C; suddenly everyone is outside, dragging plastic chairs into the street, arguing over football while grandmothers wave abanicos made from real tortoiseshell.

Food is stubbornly local. Order the sopa de tomate and you get a bowl thick enough to stand a spoon in, crowned by a quail’s egg still trembling. The jamón arrives with a rim of golden fat that melts at room temperature; the pig probably rooted under the very oaks you walked through that morning. Vegetarians survive on tortilla and irony. If the chalkboard lists “carrillada” say yes: Iberian-pork cheeks braised with cloves and bitter orange, reduced until the sauce sticks to your lips like honest Marmite. House wine is from nearby Cañamero, bottled without label and poured from a height that would give a sommelier hiccups.

Seasons That Make Their Own Rules

April paints the plain an almost Irish green. Night temperatures can dip to 6 °C; morning mists coil around the oak trunks like cigar smoke. By 11.00 the sky has burned clear and you can walk for six hours without seeing a cloud, but take a fleece – weather here comes from the Meseta, not the Med, and it brooks no argument. May brings out the bee-eaters, lime-green arrows that nest in the riverbank of the Almonte twenty minutes south. October is the photographers’ favourite: the dehesa turns the colour of Assam tea, acorns rain like hail, and the air smells of fermenting figs. Summer is for lizards, cicadas and sensible siestas. Winter, surprisingly sharp, can touch minus 5 °C; granite houses lack central heating, so villagers dress for the outside even indoors and cluster around the open fire at Bar Extremadura where chestnuts are sold by the dozen for a euro.

Getting Here, Staying Sane, Leaving Again

No train line reaches Majadas. From the UK, fly to Madrid, then drive west on the A-5 for two hours until the granite outcrops of the Sierra de San Pedro appear. Leave the motorway at Navalmoral de la Mata, follow the CC-11 for 22 km of empty road; eagles survey the tarmac from the safety posts. Car hire is essential – buses from Cáceres exist but they carry schoolchildren at 07.00 and return at 14.00, refusing to wait for anyone distracted by a hoopoe.

Accommodation is limited. The village has one hostal above the butcher’s: six rooms, €45 a night, Wi-Fi that works when the wind blows from the west. Bathrooms are spotless, towels small. Book by ringing directly – the owner, Concha, speaks no English but understands “two nights, double room, no snoring”. Alternatively, rent a cortijo five kilometres out: owners leave you firewood, a bottle of olive oil pressed from their own trees, and instructions to call if the guard dog looks depressed.

Bring binoculars, sun-cream rated SPF 50, and a phrasebook that includes “¿A qué hora cerráis?” because everything shuts unpredictably. Sundays are genuine days of rest – even the church bell rings less often. If you need cash, the nearest ATM is in Casatejada, 12 km back towards the motorway; the bar will advance you twenty euros if you order another beer and look trustworthy.

Leave before sunrise on your final morning and you will meet the shepherd who trucks his merino flock out to graze at first light. He may nod, perhaps share a word about the price of wool, then return to whistling through his teeth. The dehesa will swallow the sound, the village will shrink in the rear-view mirror, and you will carry away the certainty that somewhere between the cork and the granite, time is allowed to move at the pace of an acorn dropping.