La Rioja

Pilgrims, Monasteries and Millennia of History

The Camino Francés, the most travelled route of the Camino de Santiago, crosses La Rioja from Navarre to Castile, threading through Logroño and hugging the banks of the Ebro before climbing westward. Long before the pilgrims arrived, the Romans had already built their bridge at Logroño and planted their vines, and the Visigoths left churches that still hold morning light in the way that only very old stones can. The monasteries of San Millán de la Cogolla, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, shelter the earliest written examples of Castilian Spanish and Basque, making this valley nothing less than the birthplace of two languages. Ruins, medieval walls, and Romanesque churches emerge from hilltop villages at the kind of frequency that makes you feel the centuries compressing pleasantly around you.

Tables Worth Making Room For

The Riojan kitchen is the sort that makes visitors cancel onward plans and extend their stay by several days. Patatas a la riojana is a potato and chorizo stew of deceptive simplicity and improbable depth, the kind of dish that arrives on a cold evening and makes everything right. Roasted and stuffed peppers from Haro, artichokes from Tudela nearby, lamb from the upland pastures and freshwater fish from the Ebro all find their way onto menus that resist fuss and trust their ingredients. Logroño's tapas culture, concentrated on the famous Calle del Laurel and its adjacent lanes, operates on the principle that a small plate of something extraordinary is better than a large plate of something adequate. Michelin stars are scattered across the region too, worn lightly by chefs who still buy from the same markets their grandparents did.

Mountains, Gorges and the Sierra de la Demanda

Southern La Rioja unfolds into landscape that most visitors never expect to find. The Sierra de la Demanda and the Sierra de Cameros rise into genuinely wild territory where wolves and birds of prey are more common than tourists, and where village populations are small enough that the church bell still marks the rhythm of the day. The gorge of the Cidacos River and the badlands around Enciso, where dinosaur footprints fossilised in the Jurassic mud are now a protected palaeontological site, give the region a geological drama that pairs amusingly well with its wine credentials. Rivers cut through limestone cliffs, beech and oak forests cover the upper slopes, and walking trails trace ridgelines with views that extend across Castile on a clear day. La Rioja is small enough to cross in an afternoon and rewarding enough to occupy a fortnight.