Castile and León

Overview

Castile and León is the high tableland at the centre of northern Spain, and the fact that organises any trip here is distance: the Gothic cathedral cities, the Camino de Santiago, the roast-meat towns and the Ribera del Duero wineries sit far apart on a plateau that rarely drops below 700 metres. Trains and motorways radiate from Madrid rather than connecting the region internally, so most visitors either base themselves in one city or drive.

This is where Castilian Spanish was born. The early 11th-century cartularies of Valpuesta, in Burgos province, contain the first documented Castilian words, El Cid is buried in Burgos Cathedral, and the language was first formally studied at the University of Salamanca, founded in 1218 and one of the oldest in Europe. The accent you hear on the street is the textbook Spanish that language classes teach.

The monumental density is absurd for somewhere so empty. Burgos Cathedral, the old cities of Salamanca, Segovia and Ávila, the Sierra de Atapuerca site where Europe’s oldest hominin remains were found, the Roman aqueduct of Segovia, the Las Médulas Roman gold-mine landscape and the Camino Francés itself are all on the UNESCO list, and León Cathedral has a wall-to-wall medieval stained-glass collection that locals rank above Chartres.

The kitchen is meat and fire: whole suckling pig in Segovia, milk-fed lamb in the Ribera del Duero, blood sausage in Burgos, cured beef in León, and jamón from Guijuelo in Salamanca province that competes with Extremadura for Spain’s best. The wine, led by Ribera del Duero Tempranillo, is some of the most serious in the country.

Segovia and Ávila sit close enough to Madrid for day trips, and most people see them that way. Stay a night in either, or in Salamanca lit up after the tour buses leave, and you get a different region: quiet, cold-aired, monumental, and in no hurry at all.

History & character

Numantia and Roman gold

The pre-Roman meseta belonged to Celtiberian and related peoples, and one of their towns became a Spanish national myth. Numantia, a fortified hilltop settlement near modern Soria, held out against Roman armies for two decades before falling in 133 BCE; the survivors burned the town and themselves rather than surrender.

Rome then worked the plateau hard. Las Médulas in León province was the largest open-pit gold mine in the Roman world, carved out by the ruina montium technique, which used channelled water pressure to collapse whole hillsides. The aqueduct of Segovia, 813 metres of precision-cut granite reaching 28 metres high, no mortar involved, is the most complete Roman engineering survival in Spain.

The Kingdom of León

After the Muslim conquest of 711, the Christian kingdoms of the north pushed slowly back south. Around 910 the Asturian dynasty moved its political centre from Oviedo to León, and the city became the capital of a kingdom that at times claimed primacy over all Christian Iberia.

León’s royal machinery left physical remains that still anchor a visit: the Basilica of San Isidoro, rededicated in 1063 when the relics of Saint Isidore of Seville were brought north, and its Royal Pantheon, where eleven kings lie under 12th-century painted vaults.

Castile and El Cid

The eastern frontier of the Leonese world hardened into the County of Castile, centred on Burgos, and by the 11th century Castile was a kingdom in its own right, merging with and splitting from León for two centuries before the definitive union. Its emblematic figure is Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, born near Burgos around 1043, mercenary on both sides of the Christian-Muslim frontier, conqueror of Valencia, and hero of Spain’s national epic. He and his wife Jimena are buried under the crossing of Burgos Cathedral.

Golden Age Salamanca, capital Valladolid

The University of Salamanca, founded in 1218, was by the 15th century ranked with Paris, Bologna and Oxford among the leading universities of Europe. Its 16th-century School of Salamanca produced early systematic thinking on human rights, just war and monetary economics, much of it argued over the legality of the conquest of the Americas.

Valladolid had its own turn at the centre: briefly capital of the Spanish monarchy from 1601 to 1606 under Philip III and the Duke of Lerma, the city where Columbus died in 1506, and home to Cervantes when the first part of Don Quixote appeared in 1605.

The Comuneros

Castile’s cities rose against the young Charles V in 1520 over taxation and a court run by foreigners. The revolt of the Comuneros ended at the Battle of Villalar on 23 April 1521, and the leaders Padilla, Bravo and Maldonado were executed on the spot. That date is now the Día de Castilla y León, marked each year with a gathering at Villalar in Valladolid province.

Decline, Franco, autonomy

The meseta spent the 18th and 19th centuries losing ground to the industrialising periphery, and the 20th losing people to it. The Civil War found the region solidly Nationalist; Burgos served as Franco’s wartime capital from October 1936.

The autonomous community was created in 1983 from Old Castile and the old Kingdom of León, with Valladolid as de facto capital and seat of the regional institutions. A Leonese regionalist current still argues the merger was a mistake, and depopulation dominates regional politics: rural flight from the 1950s onward emptied whole comarcas, and parties built on the grievance now win seats.

See & do

The cathedral cities

Four of the region’s cities have full guides here, and each is worth at least a night. Burgos is the medieval Castilian capital, built around Burgos Cathedral (begun 1221, UNESCO since 1984), with the tomb of El Cid under the crossing and the Papamoscas automaton clock snapping its jaw on the hour. León pairs León Cathedral, with around 1,800 square metres of medieval glass, with San Isidoro’s frescoed Royal Pantheon, often called the Sistine Chapel of the Romanesque. Salamanca is the university city, honey-gold sandstone, UNESCO-listed since 1988, with the New Cathedral and the Romanesque Old Cathedral stacked side by side. Valladolid is the big-city outlier, better for museums and eating than for postcard views.

Go late in the day at León: the western rose window with low sun behind it is the single best interior moment in the region. Each city’s own guide covers the details; below are the two monumental cities that don’t have one.

Segovia

Segovia’s old town rides a narrow rock spur between two river valleys, with the Roman aqueduct at one end and the Alcázar at the other, and the whole ensemble has been UNESCO-listed since 1985. The aqueduct is the anchor: 813 metres of stacked granite crossing the Plaza del Azoguejo at 28 metres, standing since the 1st century CE. Walk under it, then climb the steps beside it for the rooftop-level view.

Ávila

Ávila is the walled city: 2.5 kilometres of intact 11th-century perimeter with 88 towers, UNESCO-listed since 1985, and you can walk long stretches of the rampart. The classic full-circuit view is from the Cuatro Postes monument across the river west of town, best at dusk when the walls are floodlit.

Inside, the cathedral doubles as a fortress, its apse built into the wall itself, and the city trades heavily on Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515 to 1582), the Carmelite mystic and reformer born here. Every pastry shop sells yemas de Santa Teresa, soft egg-yolk sweets named for her.

The Camino Francés

The Camino de Santiago’s main route crosses the entire width of the region, entering Burgos province at Redecilla del Camino and leaving for Galicia at the pass beyond Villafranca del Bierzo. In between: Viloria de Rioja, Belorado and a string of other Burgos-province villages with their own guides here, then Burgos itself, the open meseta, León, Astorga and Ponferrada.

Walkers either love or dread the meseta stages: dead-flat horizons, wheat to the edge of sight, villages every couple of hours built around a Romanesque church and an albergue. Towns like Castrojeriz, Frómista, Carrión de los Condes and Sahagún have been serving pilgrims since the Middle Ages, and near Castrojeriz the village of Castrillo Mota de Judíos has a guide of its own. If you only walk one section of the Camino in Castile, the approach to León from Sahagún or the climb out of Astorga into the Montes de León are the strongest.

Atapuerca and the Museum of Human Evolution

The Sierra de Atapuerca, east of Burgos, is the most important human-origins site in Europe: a railway cutting through the hills exposed cave sediments holding hominin remains spanning more than a million years, including Homo antecessor, the earliest known hominin in Western Europe. Visits to the dig are guided; book ahead in summer.

The finds live in Burgos at the Museum of Human Evolution, opened in 2010 in a Juan Navarro Baldeweg building on the south bank of the Arlanzón, with lifelike reconstructions of ten human ancestors alongside the original fossils. Do the museum and the site as a pair if you can.

Las Médulas

The Roman gold workings at Las Médulas, UNESCO-listed since 1997, left a landscape of jagged red pinnacles rising out of chestnut woods in the far west of León province. Trails fan out from the village, and the Mirador de Orellán gives the classic view over the whole eroded amphitheatre. The full guide covers routes and logistics.

Wine country

Wine touring centres on the Ribera del Duero, whose vineyards run along the Duero valley between roughly 750 and 911 metres, mostly around Aranda de Duero and Peñafiel. Most wineries take visitors by prior booking only; the food section covers the wines themselves, and Rueda, Toro and Bierzo make good add-ons if you’re driving west.

Castles and small towns

The meseta is castle country: La Mota at Medina del Campo, Peñafiel’s ship-shaped fortress above the Ribera vineyards, and the Templar castle at Ponferrada. Tordesillas is where the 1494 treaty dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal was signed, and Gaudí left one of his three buildings outside Catalonia at Astorga, the Episcopal Palace of 1889 to 1893. The towns section sorts the rest.

Towns & cities

Valladolid

Valladolid is the region’s largest city, just under 300,000 people, and its administrative capital, seat of the Junta and the regional Cortes since 1987. Its Plaza Mayor, laid out after the great fire of 1561, is considered the first of its kind in Spain and the model for the rest. Come for the Museo Nacional de Escultura’s polychrome wood sculpture, the house where Columbus died in 1506, and the Cervantes house museum; the city guide has the full picture.

Burgos

Burgos is the old Castilian capital under its UNESCO cathedral, with the Museum of Human Evolution on the riverbank and a compact old town that takes tapas seriously. Three kilometres east, the Miraflores Charterhouse holds Gil de Siloé’s alabaster tombs of Juan II and Isabel of Portugal, some of the finest late-Gothic carving anywhere, and entry is free. See the city guide for the full plan.

León

León, around 123,000 people, was the capital of the medieval kingdom and keeps its royal monuments close together: the cathedral, San Isidoro, the Plateresque San Marcos convent (now a Parador) and Gaudí’s neo-Gothic Casa Botines of 1891 to 1892. The Barrio Húmedo quarter runs the best free-tapas culture in northern Spain. Details in the city guide.

Salamanca

Salamanca is the university city, UNESCO-listed since 1988, where the Villamayor sandstone turns gold in late sun and the student population keeps the pretty centre from becoming a museum. The Plaza Mayor, built 1729 to 1755, is the most beautiful square in Spain by common consent. The city guide covers the university, the frog on the façade and the two cathedrals.

Segovia

Segovia is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes: aqueduct, Plaza Mayor and cathedral, Alcázar on its cliff. It fills with Madrid day-trippers by late morning and empties again by early evening, which is the argument for sleeping here. The old town and aqueduct are jointly UNESCO-listed.

Ávila

Ávila, at 1,131 metres the highest provincial capital in Spain, is quieter than Segovia and colder in every season. The walls are the event; inside them the town is sober, granite and monastic, true to its patron saint Teresa. It works as a half-day from Madrid or Segovia, better as an overnight for the floodlit walls.

Zamora

Zamora, around 60,000 people on a bluff above the Duero, is the region’s best-kept secret: the cathedral with its scaled Byzantine-style dome, two dozen Romanesque churches within a few streets, and a Holy Week so central to local identity that the town runs a museum of its processional sculpture. Almost no foreign tourists come. That’s a recommendation.

Soria

Soria is the small, cold capital of the emptiest province, up on the young Duero at over 1,000 metres. The riverside cloister of San Juan de Duero, with its rows of interlaced arches open to the sky, is the sight; the ruins of Numantia, the Celtiberian town that defied Rome, are a short drive north. The poet Antonio Machado taught here and wrote Soria into Spanish literature.

Palencia

Palencia is the provincial capital nobody visits, which suits it. The Gothic cathedral is nicknamed la bella desconocida, the beautiful unknown, and the province behind it holds a scatter of Romanesque village churches around Aguilar de Campoo plus the Canal de Castilla, an 18th-century canal you can walk or cycle.

Aranda de Duero

Aranda de Duero is the working capital of the Ribera del Duero wine country and the region’s lechazo town, its asadores roasting milk-fed lamb in wood ovens. Medieval wine cellars honeycomb the ground under the old town.

Astorga

Astorga sits where the Camino Francés meets the Vía de la Plata, a small cathedral town with Gaudí’s fantasy-Gothic Episcopal Palace next door. It’s the home of cocido maragato, the backwards-served stew, and of mantecadas, the local sponge cakes.

Ponferrada

Ponferrada anchors the Bierzo, the green western corner where the meseta breaks down toward Galicia. The Templar castle above the river is the draw, along with Bierzo wine and the last Camino stages; the town has its own guide.

Villages worth the detour

• Covarrubias (Burgos): medieval half-timbered village on the Arlanza, with royal Castilian tombs in its collegiate church.
• Frías (Burgos): a tiny clifftop city above the Ebro.
• Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos): Benedictine monastery with a celebrated Romanesque cloister and a tradition of Gregorian chant.
• Tordesillas (Valladolid): treaty town on the Duero.
• Medina del Campo (Valladolid): the Castle of La Mota, where Isabel the Catholic died.
• Pedraza and Sepúlveda (Segovia): stone villages in roast-lamb country, Sepúlveda hanging above the Duratón gorge.
• Berlanga de Duero and Calatañazor (Soria): medieval leftovers in the emptiest province.
• Toro (Zamora): wine town with a Romanesque collegiate church above the Duero.
• Sahagún and Villafranca del Bierzo (León): the Camino’s bookends across León province.

Food & drink

Castile and León cooks for cold weather and ceremony: whole animals in wood ovens, chickpea stews served in courses, cured meats that outlast the winter, and reds built to match. Nothing here is light, and none of it apologises.

The roast meats

Cochinillo asado, suckling pig roasted whole until the skin crackles and the meat collapses, is Segovia’s dish. Lechazo asado is the Ribera del Duero’s answer: milk-fed lamb, protected as Lechazo de Castilla y León IGP, roasted slowly in clay dishes and served with little more than salad and bread. Aranda de Duero and the villages around it are the lechazo heartland; order a cuarto (a quarter animal) between two.

A proper asador does nothing else: wood oven, lamb or pig, salad, wine. Book Sunday lunch ahead anywhere in Segovia or the Ribera, because roast lunch is what Castilian families do on Sundays.

Stews and soups

Cocido maragato, from the Maragatería around Astorga, is the region’s strangest meal: a chickpea cocido served in reverse, meats first, then chickpeas and cabbage, broth last. Sopa castellana, garlic soup with paprika, bread and a poached egg, is the standard winter starter across the meseta, and hearty bean pots built on the province’s own pulses fill the menu the rest of the way.

The cured counter

Morcilla de Burgos, protected as an IGP, is the rice-and-onion blood sausage, served sliced and fried; it has little in common with the smoked Asturian or sweet Andalusian versions. Cecina de León IGP is air-cured, oak-smoked beef, sliced thin like jamón and dressed with olive oil. And Guijuelo, in the dehesa country of southern Salamanca province, is one of Spain’s great ibérico ham towns, its DOP hams rivalled only by Extremadura’s.

The wines

Ribera del Duero, a DO since 1982, grows Tempranillo (locally Tinto Fino or Tinta del País) at 750 to 911 metres along the Duero, where scorching days and cold nights make concentrated, long-lived reds; Vega Sicilia is the legendary estate and Pesquera the classic 100% Tempranillo house. Toro, downstream in Zamora province, makes denser, wilder Tempranillo from old vines. Rueda is Spain’s benchmark white region, planted with Verdejo. Bierzo, in the wet west, grows Mencía, lighter and more aromatic than anything else in Castile. Between them they cover a whole cellar, and restaurant mark-ups on all four stay merciful.

Sweets

Yemas de Santa Teresa in Ávila, mantecadas in Astorga, and hornazo in Salamanca, a baked pie of chorizo, cured pork and hard-boiled egg that locals eat on picnics after Easter. Convent shops in Ávila and Salamanca still sell sweets through turnstiles.

Nature

The meseta reads as farmland from the road, but the region is walled by mountains on three sides: the Cantabrian range along the north, the Sistema Central along the south, and the Sistema Ibérico in the east. Two national parks touch the region, and the emptiest corners hold Iberia’s biggest wolf population.

Sierra de Guadarrama

The Guadarrama national park, declared in 2013, straddles the Madrid border, with the Segovian slope in Castile and León and Peñalara (2,428 metres) as its high point. From this side, the base is La Granja de San Ildefonso, palace gardens giving way to pine forest and granite.

Sierra de Gredos

Gredos is the bigger, wilder half of the Sistema Central, mostly in Ávila province, topping out at the Pico Almanzor (2,592 metres), with the glacial Circo de Gredos and its lake as the signature walk and the largest Spanish ibex population in Iberia on the crags. The standard route starts from the Plataforma trailhead above Hoyos del Espino; count on a full day for the lake and back.

The Cantabrian edge

León province owns the southern flanks of the Picos de Europa, with Posada de Valdeón and Caín as trailhead villages for the Cares Gorge, and the Riaño reservoir making the most dramatic mountain drive in the region. West of there the hills soften into the Bierzo and the red pinnacles of Las Médulas. For the northern side of the Picos, see Asturias and Cantabria.

Wolves and birds

The Sierra de la Culebra, a low 95-kilometre range on the Zamora-Portugal border, is one of the last strongholds of the Iberian wolf and the most reliable place in Western Europe to try to see one, helped by healthy deer and boar populations. Guided dawn and dusk watches operate from the villages; bring binoculars and expect distance.

Birders get two headline sites. The Lagunas de Villafáfila in Zamora province, a complex of shallow steppe lagoons, winters the largest greylag goose concentration in Spain along with great bustards on the surrounding plains. The limestone gorges of the Duratón and Riaza rivers in Segovia province hold big griffon vulture colonies, with the Duratón canyon also doable by canoe in summer.

The Duero

The region’s rivers all drain to the Duero, which crosses the whole plateau from Soria to the Portuguese border and gives its name to the wine country. Where it leaves Spain it cuts the granite canyons of the Arribes del Duero natural park, a sheltered microclimate of terraced olives and almonds that feels nothing like the meseta above; the far bank is Portugal.

Climate

The local proverb is nueve meses de invierno y tres de infierno: nine months of winter and three of hell. It exaggerates, but the logic is real. Almost everywhere worth visiting sits between 700 and 1,100 metres, so winters run long and hard and summers are hot by day and cool by night.

Soria, at over 1,000 metres, is one of the coldest provincial capitals in Spain, with sub-zero nights routine from November to March, and Ávila, the highest at 1,131 metres, is not far behind. Burgos and León share the same pattern; Valladolid, Zamora and Salamanca sit a little lower and run a couple of degrees milder. Snow reaches the cities a few days a year and the surrounding sierras all winter.

The exception is the Bierzo, the basin around Ponferrada in western León province, sheltered enough to grow wine, chestnuts and fruit under a softer, damper, almost Atlantic sky. Crossing to it from the plateau, the change is visible from the road.

Pack for swings whatever the season: layers and a warm jacket from October to May, sun protection and water in high summer, when shade on the meseta is a rumour.

When to go

Spring: the main window

April to mid-June is the best all-round period: mild days for the cathedral cities, green wheat instead of brown stubble, and the mountain walking opening up. Holy Week is the big event. Valladolid’s, the first in Spain declared of International Tourist Interest back in 1980, parades museum-grade polychrome sculpture through the streets, 20 brotherhoods and 33 processions in a week; Zamora’s is the region’s other giant, austere and central enough to local identity to have its own museum.

The regional day, 23 April, brings the annual gathering at Villalar on the anniversary of the Comuneros’ defeat in 1521.

Summer: hot days, cool nights

Mid-June to early September is hot on the plateau but far more liveable than Andalusia: dry air and cool evenings. It’s peak season for Gredos and the Picos, and the one time of year the stone cities feel properly animated at midnight. The odd one out on the calendar is the night of 23 June at San Pedro Manrique in Soria province, where locals walk barefoot over burning embers in the paso del fuego.

Autumn: harvest

Mid-September to early November is the second sweet spot. The vendimia fills the Ribera del Duero, Toro, Rueda and Bierzo with harvest activity, the chestnut woods around Las Médulas turn, and hotels are quiet. Walkers get the Camino at its emptiest decent-weather moment.

Winter: cold and clear

November to March is cold, often brilliantly clear, and the cathedral cities are at their most atmospheric with almost nobody in them. Expect short days, sub-zero mornings and reduced hours at smaller sights; many rural guesthouses close in January and February. If you want roast lamb, log fires and empty naves, this is your season.

Getting there

Via Madrid

Madrid is the practical way in. The region’s own airports at Valladolid, León and Salamanca see only thin domestic traffic, while Barajas is one to three hours from every major city in the region by train or motorway.

By train

The high-speed line north from Madrid opened to Segovia and Valladolid in 2007 and was extended to Palencia and León in 2015; AVE trains cover Madrid to Valladolid in about 56 minutes and Madrid to León in just over two hours. Segovia’s Guiomar station is the first stop out of Madrid, which is what makes the town such an easy day trip. Burgos joined the high-speed network in 2022, and the Madrid to Galicia high-speed line, completed in 2021, serves Zamora on its way west. Salamanca and Ávila connect to Madrid by direct trains on slower lines, and Soria remains the hard case, quicker by bus.

By bus

ALSA, Avanza and smaller operators run frequent coaches from Madrid to all nine provincial capitals, and they beat the train on price everywhere and on time to Soria and Ávila. Buses also provide most of the direct links from the Basque Country, Asturias and Galicia into the northern half of the region.

By car

The A-1 runs Madrid to Burgos, the A-6 crosses the region toward Galicia via Tordesillas, Benavente and the Bierzo, the A-62 links Burgos, Valladolid and Salamanca diagonally, and the A-66 follows the old Vía de la Plata north-south through León, Zamora and Salamanca. Every major city is under four hours’ drive from Madrid, and traffic on the meseta motorways is light by any European standard.

From Portugal

The A-62 continues past Salamanca to the border at Fuentes de Oñoro, the main road crossing from northern Portugal; Zamora sits an easy drive from Bragança, and the high-speed line to Galicia has made the northwest border country far more reachable than it was.

Getting around

Trains: hub and spoke

Rail inside the region works best through Valladolid, which has direct services toward León, Palencia, Burgos, Salamanca and Zamora. Many other city pairs (Burgos to Salamanca, anything to Soria) involve a change or a detour via Madrid, a quirk of a network built to radiate from the capital. Check the connection before assuming two neighbouring cities are linked; sometimes the bus is the honest answer.

Buses

Regional buses fill the gaps: the wine villages from Valladolid and Aranda de Duero, the Bierzo from León, the Sierra de Gredos villages from Ávila, and the Camino towns along the whole route. Frequencies thin out badly at weekends and in the smallest villages, so plan rural legs on weekdays.

Car: the right answer

A car is close to essential for the Ribera del Duero wineries, Gredos, Las Médulas, Atapuerca and the medieval villages (Pedraza, Sepúlveda, Covarrubias, Frías, Santo Domingo de Silos). Distances are honest meseta distances, two hours or more between provincial capitals, but the roads are fast and empty.

On foot and by bike

The Camino Francés crosses the region west to east and is walkable in stages using the albergue network; the Vía de la Plata, the old Roman north-south road, carries a quieter pilgrim route through Salamanca, Zamora and Astorga. Several disused railways have been converted to vías verdes for cycling, and the Canal de Castilla towpaths in Palencia province are dead flat. City centres everywhere are compact enough that you’ll never need urban transport beyond your feet.

Practical info

For Spain-wide basics (currency, plugs, time zone, tipping, ETIAS), see the Spain country guide. What follows is specific to Castile and León.

Altitude and cold

Nearly everything sits between 700 and 1,100 metres, with Ávila the highest provincial capital in Spain at 1,131 metres. From November to March, pack for sub-zero mornings even on sunny days, and check heating before booking older stone-built rural accommodation; some of it is better at looking cosy than being warm.

Free tapas in León

León keeps the free-tapa custom alive in a way most of Spain has abandoned: order a drink in the Barrio Húmedo and a small plate arrives with it, no menu and no choice. A crawl of five or six bars replaces dinner comfortably. Outside León the custom is patchy; assume tapas cost money elsewhere in the region.

Booking the big sights

Atapuerca can only be visited on guided tours, and summer slots go early, so reserve before you travel and pair the site with the Museum of Human Evolution in Burgos. Ribera del Duero wineries almost all require advance booking too; the tasting-room walk-in culture of newer wine regions hasn’t reached the Duero.

Languages

Castilian Spanish is universal, and the local variety is the prestige accent of the language. Leonese survives as a minority Romance language, recognised in the autonomy statute as heritage but not co-official, and Galician is spoken in the western fringe of the Bierzo. English gets you through hotels and major sights in the cathedral cities but wears thin fast in rural provinces; a few words of Spanish repay themselves quickly here.

Wildlife trips

The Culebra is also a hunting reserve, so stick with local guides who know the access rules. For emergencies anywhere, including the mountains, the number is 112.

Bullfighting country

Bullfighting remains legal and active, with major rings in the biggest cities, and the dehesa pastures of southern Salamanca province raise many of Spain’s fighting-bull herds. Whatever your view of it, the breeding estates shape the landscape you drive through between Salamanca and the Extremadura border.