There are few images of rural Spain more classical (or idealistically painted) than flocks of sheep grazing across the dry, golden landscape of the country’s interior. A pastor (shepherd) follows—walking stick in hand, a knapsack slung over a shoulder—watching, seemingly with casual attention, as a small dog bounds somewhere around the animals.
Sheep have long played an important part in Spanish history, especially in Castilla and the central meseta tablelands. The animals are smart, but also extraordinarily resistant and extremely adaptable to the harsh climate of the meseta, with its scorching, dry summers, and bitter, cold winters. Merino sheep were introduced into Spain from North Africa around the twelfth century, and the line was bred and refined for their fleecy wool. Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, the European wool market was centralized in Burgos, capital of Old Castile for five hundred years and home to one of the most spectacular Gothic cathedrals in the country. In the heady days of the 1500s, there were some three million sheep in Spain, with spun wool flowing north through ports like Bilbao and Santander en route to the important cloth industries of Flanders, the great medieval principality that today is divided among Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. For centuries, Spain held a monopoly on merino wool, and until the eighteenth century, it was forbidden to export the sheep.
In the autumn, great flocks of migrating sheep moved (and still move!) from summer pastures in the north down to winter pastures in the south, and then back in springtime, following long pathways called Cañadas Reales. In 1273, King Alfonso X el Sabio (“the Wise”) guaranteed and protected these paths by royal edict, and also set up an organization called the Concejo de Mesta to govern them. The cañadas had to be a width of 90 varas castellanas (that is, 237 feet/72.22 m), and generally run for distances over 300 miles/480 km. Numerous smaller routes fed into these. Of the nine key routes in Spain, the longest runs from Soria to Sevilla, some 500 miles/800 km south in Andalucía. The vast web of routes, sprawling across much of the center of the country, totals some 78,000 miles/125,000 km.
And while sheep are a symbol of the Castilian landscape, they are also an emblem of its kitchen. What could be more characteristic than a wedge of nutty, aged Manchego cheese, or a quarter of roast suckling lamb slid from the wood-burning oven of a centuries-old, tile-walled mesón? And, for that matter, what could be tastier?