Introducing Extremadura

Spain’s fourth-largest wine-producing region has much to boast about, yet it remains relatively unknown. Now, finding its own style and making the most of its little-known DO, Extremadura is starting to make its mark internationally, as David Williams discovers

- David Williams

The people of Extremadura like to remark on how neatly their home region’s name fits its characteristics. This is an extreme place, they say, with a knowing smile – extreme and hard: extrema y dura. They’re talking about the climate out here on the border of Portugal, in Spain’s wild west. With its long, dry, searingly hot summers and cold winters, this is the ur-Spain, where olive groves and hunched clusters of whitewashed houses provide the visual relief in the dusty, sun-blasted, terracotta-coloured terrain.

There’s a certain pride too, in knowing what it takes to survive and thrive here. Some locals will tell you the conditions breed a specific kind of toughness and self-reliance, which helps explain, they say, why so many of the original conquistadors grew up around here. It makes for defiance too: in a region that tends to be overlooked by the rest of Spain – and, although things are changing, with the 82 million tourists who visit the country each year – there’s a cussed feeling of ‘we’ll do things our own way, and won’t much care what the rest of you think about us’.

The feeling doesn’t quite translate to matters gastronomic, a sphere of endeavour in which the Extremadurans feel they have a lenghty history and a level of expertise that deserves to be treated with the maximum respect.

The Extremadura region is widely acknowledged as being the home of jamón Ibérico, Spain’s most coveted ham, made, in its finest incarnation, from the native breed pata negra pigs who graze freely for acorns in the region’s ancient oak woodland dehesa.