Conquista de la Sierra

The church bell strikes midday and the only reply is a tractor coughing into life. In Conquista de la Sierra, population 201, this counts as the rush hour. The village perches at 412 m on the soft roll of the Trujillo hills, high enough for the air to carry a hint of thyme yet low enough that olives still outnumber oaks. From the single bench in the plaza you can watch the day’s entire script: bread van at ten, postman at eleven, dogs that rearrange themselves with the shade.

Granite walls the colour of weathered tweed hold the houses together; their roofs of curved Arab tile are the colour of burnt toast after a century of sun. No one has bothered to sandblast or repaint, so the village keeps its bruises—cracked plaster, iron balconies sagging like old pockets, a date 1897 chiselled above a doorway now missing its door. The aesthetic is accidental, honest, and increasingly rare in a region that has learnt to add gift-shop lace to every window.

Walk the three principal streets—Calle Real, Calle Nueva, Calle de la Iglesia—and you cover the whole settlement in eight minutes, unless you stop to read the plaques villagers fix beside their gates: “Here lived D. Severiano, teacher, 1924-1983.” The custom feels half memorial, half reminder that the place once needed a full-time teacher. Children today catch the school bus to Trujillo, 25 km south, leaving the playground silent except at weekends when grandchildren visit and the rusty swing protests like a weather vane.

Beyond the last houses the tarmac gives up. A farm track continues between dehesas of holm and cork oak where black Iberian pigs shuffle for acorns. The walking is easy—rolling rather than rugged—though you will share the path with the occasional 4×4 whose driver waves without slowing. After 40 minutes the land dips and a granite tor rises like a broken tooth; from its crest you can see back to the village roofs and, on a clear winter day, the silver ribbon of the Tagus plain 30 km north. Bring water: there are no bars, no fountains, and phone signal vanishes with the first hill.

Spring arrives suddenly, usually in the first week of March, when the meadows turn the vivid green of a snooker table and white chamomile spots the verges. Temperatures sit in the low 20s—T-shirt weather by midday, jumper again at dusk. Summer, by contrast, is a furnace; thermometers touch 38 °C and the streets empty between two and five. If you insist on July or August, plan like a local: walk at dawn, siesta through the afternoon, reappear at nine when the plaza fills with folding chairs and gossip. Autumn brings cranes overhead and the smell of distilling holm-oak acorns for pig feed. Winter is short but sharp; night frosts are common and the single grocery sometimes sells out of firewood before the delivery lorry from Cáceres makes it up the hill.

That grocery—open 09:00-13:00, 17:00-20:00, closed Sunday afternoon and all Monday—stocks tinned tuna, UHT milk, local chorizo and, mysteriously, one shelf of British digestive biscuits whose sell-by date is 2019. For anything more exotic (fresh coriander, say, or a toothbrush) you drive to the supermarket in Trujillo. What the village does produce is oil: a small cooperative at the edge of town presses olives trucked in from surrounding groves. Bring your own 500 ml bottle and they will fill it for €4 while you watch the grey paste extrude like toothpaste.

There is no hotel, no casa rural, not even a room above the bar. Staying overnight means persuading someone to rent you their cousin’s house, a transaction conducted in rapid Extremaduran Spanish and concluded with a handshake. Most visitors base themselves in Trujillo or Cáceres and visit for the afternoon. The drive from Cáceres takes 35 minutes on the EX-390, a road narrow enough that encountering a lorry requires both vehicles to breathe in. The last 4 km are uphill and unguarded; if you meet rain, add ten minutes and second gear.

Food is served in the only bar, Mesón La Sierra, whose opening hours obey lunar logic. When the door is ajar you can order migas—fried breadcrumbs with garlic and grapes—plus a plate of jamón that costs €8 and arrives still bearing the knife marks of the owner. He will ask where you are from, how you found the village, and whether you think Brexit was a good idea. Answer carefully; his son lives in Swindon.

Festivals punctuate the calendar like exclamation marks in a quiet novel. The fiesta patronal, held the second weekend of August, doubles the population. Emigrants return from Madrid and Barcelona, a sound system appears in the plaza, and the butcher sets up a grill that dispenses pork skewers until 03:00. If you prefer penance to parties, come at Easter: a single procession carries a 17th-century Christ through the streets while women in black chant the Passion in voices cracked by cold. The effect is austere, unphotogenic, and oddly moving.

Birdwatchers bring binoculars in March and September when storks thermalling overhead outnumber villagers. The dehesa hosts hoopoes, short-toed eagles and, if you are lucky, a black-shouldered kite hovering above the grass like a kestrel in negative. Dawn is the best time; the village below is still dark, but the eastern sky turns pink and the first tractor light flicks on, a lone star at ground level.

Leave before nightfall in winter and you will see every house glowing with the same amber tone—low-watt bulbs, wood stoves, perhaps a television behind lace curtains. There is no street-lighting; darkness arrives complete, making the Milky Way feel like local council property. The silence is so total you can hear your own pulse, a private soundtrack to a place that has not quite decided whether it is asleep or simply waiting for the next season to roll over the hill.