Jaraíz de la Vera

Overview

Jaraíz de la Vera is a working town of around 6,800 people in the north-east of Cáceres province, the main town of the comarca of La Vera and the seat of the regulatory council for Pimentón de la Vera, the oak-smoked paprika that carries a protected designation of origin. It sits at 561 metres on the southern flank of the Sierra de Gredos, and it calls itself the Capital Mundial del Pimentón on its own road signs.

Set your expectations properly. Jaraíz is ringed by five villages that hold Conjunto Histórico-Artístico status (Villanueva, Valverde and Pasarón de la Vera, Cuacos de Yuste and Garganta la Olla) and it is not one of them. This is the comarca’s service town: the bus station, the shops, the health centre, the paperwork. What it has that the prettier neighbours do not is the paprika itself, and a museum that explains it properly.

The centre is the Plaza Mayor, built to roughly its present shape in the 16th century and unusual for being laid out on two levels, fully arcaded, with Renaissance granite columns. The lower level has a circular fountain carved with the town’s coat of arms and the Casa Palacio del Obispo Manzano, now the Museo del Pimentón. The upper level, also arcaded, was where the livestock markets and the artisan sales happened.

Climate is Mediterranean with an Atlantic edge, softened by Gredos blocking the cold northerlies. Mean annual temperature is 14.5 °C, winters average about 7 °C, summers about 24.5 °C, and annual rainfall clears 500 mm, which is why the slopes above town stay green when the Extremaduran plain has burnt off. The pepper harvest starts in September and October, which is also when the smoke-drying begins.

History

People were farming and burying their dead here five thousand years ago. The Dolmen Lamoina I, a chamber-and-corridor megalith of the Chalcolithic, was found intact, and roughly seven hundred grave goods from it are held at the Museo Arqueológico de Cáceres. A second dolmen, Lamoina II, turned up in May 2010 during construction of the town’s new wastewater treatment plant, at a spot called El Canchal; the wider area may hold as many as 38 megalithic monuments.

The town proper begins with a castle. Arab builders raised the fortress of Jariza in about the 8th century on the high side of what is now the Plaza Mayor, and Arabs, Christians and later Jews settled under it. The name is usually derived from the Arabic sha’ra (scrubland, rockrose) plus hisn (castle), giving something close to “castle among the rockroses”; a rival local story says the castle was built by the Caí of Plasencia for his daughter Jariza. Fragments of the castle survive inside private houses on the upper arcade, and one street kept the memory: it was the calle de los Albarranes, after the albarrana watchtowers on the wall, now worn down to Calle Barranes.

The first solid documentary trace is 1217, when Honorius III granted a bull to Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, authorising churches in the reconquered comarcas, Jaraíz among them. For centuries after that Jaraíz was a village of Plasencia, one of the ten settlements of the sexmo de La Vera. It bought its way out in 1685, when it took the title of villa de realengo and answered to the crown instead.

Paprika arrived long before it made anyone rich. Peppers came back to Spain with Columbus on his second voyage, and their cultivation spread through Jeronymite monasteries including Yuste, a few kilometres up the road at Cuacos de Yuste; the step from pepper to smoked pimentón came centuries later and nobody knows exactly how. The modern payoff is legal: Pimentón de la Vera was registered as a European protected designation of origin on 22 August 2007, in three grades, dulce, agridulce and picante, and the Consejo Regulador sits in Jaraíz. The museum opened in the Palacio del Obispo Manzano on 19 January 2007.

Tobacco joined pimentón as the other cash crop of the valley, and the two share the town’s biggest fiesta in August. As late as 1980, 60 per cent of the working population was still in agriculture.

Visiting

Start on the Plaza Mayor, because everything worth an hour is on it or two minutes from it. The Museo de Identidad del Pimentón de la Vera occupies the Casa Palacio del Obispo Manzano at Plaza Mayor 7, a baroque building on the square that was the birthplace of Juan Domingo Manzano y Carvajal, bishop of Jaca in 1750. It runs over three floors: a short film on the ground floor uses the figure of Tía Maína to explain how the pepper reached Europe, the second floor covers the culture, botany and tools of the crop plus the birth of the DOP, and the third shows the smoke-drying and the milling machinery. Give it 45 minutes.

The church of Santa María de Altagracia stands uphill off the square, on Calle Crucera de Santa María at the Cuesta de la Torre. It was built from the early 15th century over a Romanesque-Gothic building, and the tower’s first storey carries the arms of bishop Gonzalo de Santa María, who held the see from 1425 to 1446. The two things to look at are outside and above: the doorway on the epistle side, early Gothic with a pointed arch under an ogee and diamond-point carving down the jamb shafts, and the west rose window with its seven small multifoil circles. Inside there is a churrigueresque retablo and a Crucified Christ from the first half of the 16th century, and a stations of the cross made in the 1990s by the Plasencia artist Antonio Blázquez.

Outside San Miguel’s north door there is an information panel about something genuinely unusual: a Special Protection Area for birds that lies inside the town itself. About 33 hectares of the municipality are protected for a breeding colony of lesser kestrel, Falco naumanni.

Walk east out of the centre to the parque de los Bolos, on the road towards Cuacos de Yuste and Madrigal de la Vera. It was built in 1981 on three levels, the middle one added in 2006 purely as a viewpoint, and it holds the relocated picota along with a monument to the valley’s farm labourers. The view runs across the Sierra de Gredos and the Sierra de Tormantos.

The park is also the trailhead for the two easiest waymarked walks. The Charco de las Brujas route runs 2.9 km one way, about an hour, on a good earth track past tobacco drying sheds and irrigated orchards to a pool on the garganta de Pedro Chate. The Pilas de Collado route is 4.6 km one way, roughly 1 hour 30, ending at water-drilled rock formations on the same stream. From the Fuente del Jaralillo on the Avenida de la Montaña, the Cerro de las Cabezas circuit is 5 km and two hours through oak, pine and chestnut to a fire lookout.

For swimming rather than walking, the natural pool known as El Lago, built on the bed of the garganta de Pedro Chate, has a sand beach, changing rooms, showers, a picnic area and a bar-restaurant, and is signposted with two entrances off the EX-203.

Tips

• The Museo del Pimentón closes on Mondays, and shuts for lunch every day. Winter afternoons are 16:00 to 18:00, summer afternoons 17:00 to 19:00, and Sunday is mornings only, 9:30 to 14:30.

• The big fiesta is the Fiestas del Tabaco y el Pimiento, 11 to 15 August. It opens on the night of the 11th with the pregón and the Premio Picota, an award shaped as a replica of the 1685 pillar, includes the best tobacco and best pepper competition judged at the town hall doors, and finishes with fireworks in the early hours of the 16th.

• If you want the town quiet, avoid the last weekend of July. The national motorbike rally has run since 1988 and can push the population to around 11,000.

• Carnival is worth planning around. Parades fall on the Saturday and Monday, and on Ash Wednesday the Entierro de la Sardina carries a coffin through the streets behind hired mourners, followed by free grilled sardines and ponche on the Plaza Mayor.

• There is no railway. The interurban bus station is on the Avenida de la Constitución, and it handles both the local services around La Vera and the coach connections to Madrid, Plasencia and Cáceres.

• Driving distances from Jaraíz: Plasencia 32 km, Mérida 178 km, Cáceres 112 km, Madrid 223 km. The town is a junction on the EX-203 through La Vera and the EX-392 south to the EX-119, so most people arrive by car.

• Buy pimentón in the three grades and taste the difference before you commit: dulce, agridulce and picante, all made from the local ocales, jaranda, jariza, jeromín and bola peppers.

• May, June, September and early October are the sensible months. September and October are also when the pepper harvest and the smoke-drying start, so the paprika story is actually happening while you are there.

• Carry your own water on the walks. The town hall’s own route notes say the springs on the Ruta de las Fuentes and the Pilas de Collado route are not guaranteed drinkable, and recommend a hat, a stick and proper shoes.

• If you are eating locally, the dishes the town puts forward are its trout, cuchifrito, mojé de peces, goat and its pork products. This is Extremadura at its most agricultural, and the good stuff is in the small shops rather than the souvenir racks.