Berlanga

Overview

Berlanga is a whitewashed farming town of about 2,175 people in the Campiña Sur, the southern strip of Badajoz province, sitting halfway between Llerena and Azuaga on the N-432 from Badajoz to Granada. It is a working agricultural town rather than a sight, and an hour covers the three things worth stopping for: a big Baroque parish church above a double square, an old bridge over the arroyo Culebra, and a municipal wildlife park on the edge of the built-up area.

The name arrived from the Meseta. Castilian shepherds from the lands of Osma and Berlanga de Duero repopulated this part of the Campiña in the medieval period and brought both the place name and the local devotion to Santo Domingo with them. If you were looking for the walled Berlanga with the castle, that is Berlanga de Duero in Soria, 600 kilometres north of here.

The old quarter is the part worth walking. Narrow, twisting lanes open into small irregular squares, and the housing is the rural Campiña model: single-storey homes with a loft above, carefully limewashed, mixed with grander town houses carrying Baroque façades of mouldings, raised surrounds, sgraffito panels and stone coats of arms.

The land around it is nearly flat, ranging from 520 metres on the arroyo Culebra in the north to 623 metres at Las Garzonas in the south, and the town itself sits at 573 metres. Summer highs push past 34 °C, which shapes the day here more than anything else does. This is Extremadura with no monumental set piece and no tourist infrastructure, which is either the point or the problem depending on what you came for.

History

The oldest thing found in the municipality is a basalt stone from Los Carriles dated to roughly 5000 BC, with a bell beaker vessel turning up later at La Nava. Roman material is more substantial: amphorae, oil lamps, column bases, a funerary stone, and probably the foundations of the bridge over the arroyo Culebra. The lead mines in the municipal district appear to have been worked by the Romans too, for the small quantities of silver the ore carried.

The settlement grew at that crossing point, on the route between Mérida and Córdoba: a Roman road first, then a cañada real for transhumant flocks, then the N-432. After the Christian conquest the district passed to the Order of Santiago, which made Berlanga the head of an encomienda; the comarca of Reina came to the Order in 1246. Position on the Mesta droving routes and closeness to Llerena turned it into a prosperous farming and craft town producing frisas, a coarse wool cloth, and silk.

By 1494 the Order’s visitation books counted 200 vecinos, meaning heads of household; there were 435 by 1552, 480 by 1587 and 557 by 1591. Between 1493 and 1539, 26 berlangueños left for the Americas.

The marquisate was later absorbed into the House of Alba, so the town spent the following centuries under Alba lordship, which took the tithes on produce apart from grain and seed. Two more documents pin down the sixteenth-century town: the municipal ordinances of 1574 and the founding rule of the Hermandad de la Veracruz, dated 1567.

The eighteenth century was Berlanga’s high point. It reached 1,100 vecinos and was one of the most populous places in the comarca, and it ran a Real Fábrica de Paños, a royal cloth works staffed by masters, journeymen and apprentices, with almost all the women of the town spinning and weaving at home.

Mining restarted in the late nineteenth century under French capital, with pits named El Corral, El Zapo, El Calvo, La Dehesa, Reznique, Los Gemelos, El Chaparral, Arroyo Conejo, San Miguel and Pozo la Milla. They produced lead, peaked before the Civil War and some stayed open into the late 1940s; the miners were the town’s political motor during the Second Republic.

Berlanga peaked at 6,797 people in the 1930 census. The 1960s and 1970s emptied it: families left for Germany, Switzerland and Spanish cities, and the count fell from 5,711 in 1960 to 2,951 in 1981, roughly halving in two decades. The decline has continued slowly since, from 2,732 in 1991 to about 2,175 in 2025, which is why so many houses in the old quarter are shuttered outside the August fiestas.

Visiting

Nothing in Berlanga charges admission and nothing publishes opening hours, so the visit is whatever you make of a walk plus the park. Start at the two squares at the edge of the old quarter, set at different levels and joined by a broad flight of steps. The town hall stands on the lower one, at Paseo de Extremadura 1, and the parish church of Nuestra Señora de Gracia presides over the upper.

The church is the one genuinely serious building here, a Baroque work of the same family as those at Llerena, Azuaga and Granja de Torrehermosa. It splits into two clearly different parts: a limewashed masonry body with elaborate Baroque doorways and small cupolas breaking the roofline, and a much plainer tower-façade of masonry and brick at the west end. Inside it is wide, high and very bright, and the organ with its supporting gallery is the piece to look for. It was declared a monument of historic and artistic interest in 1990.

Two smaller things sit close by: the ermita de Santo Domingo, a compact fifteenth-century chapel, and the old Casa de la Encomienda of the Order of Santiago. The medieval town also had a fortification, but nothing of it survives beyond the name attached to the site.

Downhill from the bridge is Las Quinientas, a municipal park on the town’s own estate, named for the roughly 500 fanegas of land it occupies. The arroyo Culebra is dammed near the bridge to form the largest of its lakes, with a second reservoir inside the park fed by the arroyo Caldealacranes; both are edged with timber fencing and stone-laid paths, and ducks, geese and swans nest on the islets.

The rest of the park splits into a reserve zone and a services zone. The reserve is planted with pine, with eucalyptus in the southeast, and is partly closed off by game fencing that lets smaller animals through but keeps mouflon, red deer and fallow deer inside; peacocks, guinea fowl, doves, African turtle doves, partridge, quail and rabbits share it. The services zone is the picnic end, built in wood and stone: a children’s play area, barbecues, log stores and picnic shelters, a fourteen-hole minigolf course, and a kiosk-bar with a terrace and an upper-floor viewing gallery over most of the park, next to the car park.

For eating, the local repertoire is lamb and suckling pig, chanfaina, and cured sausage, with chorizo blanco and salchichón the ones to ask for. The baking is hornazos, gañotes, perrunillas and torrijas. A string of roadside places has grown up along the N-432 on the strength of the Córdoba traffic, and Berlanga is a standard stop for hauliers on that run.

Tips

• Come for the fiestas or accept a quiet town. Santiago y Santa Ana falls on 25 and 26 July, and the patronal fiestas run 22 to 25 August, which is when emigrant families come home and the place is at full strength.

• You need a car. Berlanga sits on the N-432 between kilometre points 121 to 124 and 129 to 136, with local roads to Maguilla and Higuera de Llerena. Badajoz city is 133 kilometres away.

• The church has no published visiting hours and no keyholder service. Aim for the period around a service, and if the door is locked, the exterior doorways and the tower are most of what makes the building worth the detour anyway.

• Ring the town hall if you need anything official or want to check whether the park facilities are running: 924 894 001 or 924 894 406, at Paseo de Extremadura 1.

• Las Quinientas has game fencing across part of it, so the deer and mouflon are behind wire rather than roaming free. It is a managed park with barbecues and a play area, not open countryside, and it works best as a picnic stop with children rather than as a hike.

• Don’t plan on a tourist office, a museum or English menus. The provincial tourism site is the only place that lists accommodation and restaurants for the municipality, and there is nothing curated on the ground.

• If you want the local craft rather than the food, it is pottery and hand-made rustic leather boots.

• Berlanga makes most sense as a break on the Mérida to Córdoba run rather than a destination. The N-432 it sits on follows the old Roman road and later drove route between Mérida and Córdoba, so it slots into that drive without a detour.