Day 11 moved deeper into Andalucía’s interior and further back in time, starting at Itálica just outside Seville where the streets of the first Roman settlement outside Italy still carry the imprint of Hadrian and Trajan, then shifting north into the Sierra de Aracena where the landscape turned into oak forest, remote hilltop villages, and finally the hyper-unique world of Iberian ham; from the quiet ruins of a mosque still standing in Almonaster la Real, to the industrial-poetic precision of Jabugo’s curing cellars at Cinco Jotas, the day unfolded as a study in endurance and transformation, before ending underground in Aracena’s Gruta de las Maravillas, a cathedral of stone and water where lakes, crystals, and slow geological patience made human scale feel briefly irrelevant, and by nightfall the journey ended, poetically, with the best pluma de bellota we had in the entire trip.
Itálica: The City That Made Two Emperors
To break up the trip, we stopped first at Itálica, just outside of Seville. Partly because it was on the way, but especially because it tied me somehow to my Romanian lineage. Trajan, the Roman emperor who conquered what was then Dacia, today Romania, was born here. So was the next emperor, my namesake, Hadrian. And at some point, this was one of the biggest imperial outposts outside of Rome. So, there!
The city was founded in 206 BC by the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio, who defeated Hannibal, ending Carthaginian power in the Iberian Peninsula. He settled his soldiers on this hill, naming the town Italica after their homeland. It was the first Roman settlement outside the Italian peninsula.
The city grew steadily from that military camp into a prosperous colonial center. In the first and second centuries AD, two men born here who later became emperors of Rome. Trajan (born 53 AD, emperor from 98 to 117) was the first born outside the homeland, and his reign marked the greatest territorial extent of the Roman Empire, including the conquest of Dacia (today, Romania). Standing in the place where Trajan was born felt like bumping into a distant relative (a “family” reunion of sorts, happening two thousand years later; something poetic about a Romanian visiting the birthplace of the emperor who turned Dacia… ahem…Roman). Hadrian (born 76 AD, emperor from 117 to 138, adopted successor of Trajan) expanded Itálica massively, building the nova urbs (new city) and elevating its status to colonia, the highest Roman civic designation. He also built Hadrian's Wall in Britain, commissioned the Pantheon in Rome, and traveled the empire more extensively than any emperor before or after. Perhaps explains a bit my inclination for extensive travels as well… 😃
The site today is divided between the nova urbs (Hadrian's expansion, preserved because it was largely abandoned rather than built over when the city eventually declined) and the vetus urbs (original town), which lies under modern Santiponce and remains mostly unexcavated. The nova urbs is where you walk, and it delivers consistently.
The streets are original Roman stone, the paving slabs worn but intact after 1,900 years. Walking the Cardo Maximus on ancient paving while cypress trees line the route and the Sierra Norte sits blue on the horizon is one of those simple, physical experiences that does what no museum exhibit can: makes the distance between you and the Romans collapse briefly into something approaching proximity.
What remains of the houses of the nova urbs are the city's most intimate detail. The aristocratic domus of the Hadrianic quarter have mosaic floors still visible. The House of the Birds (birds rendered in a courtyard mosaic with extreme naturalistic precision, every species identifiable), the House of Neptune (the sea god surrounded by sea creatures), and the Planetarium House, whose floor depicts the seven planetary deities that gave their names to the days of the week. These mosaics were laid by craftsmen working about 200 years after the city's founding, when Itálica was at its zenith (a city of perhaps 8,000 to 10,000 people with a 37-kilometer aqueduct, sophisticated sewers, and public baths that functioned as the social hubs they were throughout the Roman world). The best mosaics have been moved to the Archaeological Museum of Seville; what remains is still extraordinary, and the in-place quality (lying in the sun, exposed to the sky, on the floor of what was once a private dining room) communicates something a museum case can’t.
The Traianeum: the temple Hadrian built in honor of his deified adoptive father. Its footprint, a double insula at the city's highest point, is still legible from the perimeter, the column bases still in position. It was one of the largest temples in the Roman Empire. That it stood in a town of 10,000 people in southern Hispania, rather than in Rome itself, speaks to what Hadrian's birthplace meant to him.
The amphitheatre: the best-preserved monument on the site and the most emotionally direct. One of the three largest in the Roman Empire (held 25,000 spectators, compared to the Colosseum's approximately 50,000) its outer walls largely gone, but its interior still fully legible: the curved slope where the seating rose in three tiers, the vaulted entrance passages through which spectators filed on fight days, and the central pit, the fossa bestiaria, the underground service area where caged animals were held before being released into the arena. You can walk into the entrance passages. You can stand in what was the animal section. The cypress trees that line the outer edges cast long morning shadows across the stone. And since I mentioned GoT before, this too was a filming location, involving some dragons as well. With patience, I have a “bonus section” at the end of this series that goes into a lot more details about the many GoT locations encountered during this trip. Stay tuned…
Standing in the arena pit, looking up at the stone seats around you and the blue Andalucían sky above, the scale of what this city once was becomes crystal clear. 25,000 people watching gladiators and animals fight in a city of 8,000. They came from across the region, from Hispalis (Seville), from the surrounding towns. This was the entertainment infrastructure of a civilization. It was nearly empty when we arrived, but a school group was making their way up already.
Within the same “complex” (yet separate, about a kilometer away) the restored ruins of the Roman Theatre. Built under Augustus in the late 1st century BC, could seat roughly 3,000–4,000 spectators. Its semicircular tiers carved into the hillside, once finished with marble and statuary for a prosperous Roman audience. Buried, reused, and forgotten for centuries, it was only rediscovered in modern times and carefully restored. Today, in a nice bit of historical continuity, it once again hosts performances, with a more intimate crowd of a few hundred under the Andalusian sky. Don’t skip it.
Almonaster la Real: The Forgotten Mosque
The route from Itálica to Jabugo takes you northwest through the Sierra de Aracena. Rolling highlands of Huelva province, chestnut and oak forest, white villages on steep hillsides, a landscape that feels genuinely apart from the tourist Andalucía of the coast. About 140 kilometers from Seville, at a crossroads in the middle of the sierra, the village of Almonaster la Real sits on a hill with a secret.
On the hilltop above the village, within a ruined castle complex, stands a small mosque. Not a converted mosque. Not a ruined mosque reconstructed for tourism. A mosque that still looks like a mosque: its prayer hall, its mihrab indicating the direction of Mecca, its minaret (repurposed as a bell tower after the Reconquista but whose proportions still speak their original language) largely standing, even though it was built in the 9th or 10th century during the height of the Umayyad Caliphate.
Most rural mosques in Spain did not survive the Reconquista in recognizable form. They were demolished, stripped for building material, or converted so thoroughly that their original identity requires specialist archaeology to detect. This one, perhaps because it was small and remote and of no particular strategic importance to the Christian forces who took it, was adapted rather than erased: a bell added to the minaret, a small alteration to orient the space toward Christian use, the fabric otherwise left essentially as it was built. The mihrab still there. The prayer hall's horseshoe arches are still there.
We were the only visitors. From the hilltop, the Sierra de Aracena extended in every direction, rolling hills under an enormous sky, no other structure visible and, far below, the white houses of the village. Fifteen minutes. Tourist-free. A quiet village below. Genuinely ancient. No entry fee. Worth every kilometer of the detour.
Jabugo & Cinco Jotas: The Cathedral of Ham
Jabugo is a village of roughly 2,100 people in the Sierra de Aracena, and it stands in the same relationship to jamón ibérico de bellota that Champagne stands to sparkling wine: the geographic designation, the terroir, the place whose name has become shorthand for the thing at its best. The Protected Designation of Origin Jabugo, established in 2017, protects the name and enforces the standards. The microclimate of this specific sierra, its altitude (658 meters), its humidity, its cool and clean air circulating through the mountain passes and into the natural drying chambers of the bodegas, is not replicated anywhere else and produces curing conditions that cannot be fully reproduced by industrial methods.
To understand why this ham is different, you need to understand three things.
First, the animal. The cerdo ibérico (the black Iberian pig) is a semi-wild breed descended from ancient Iberian pigs and the wild boar, built differently from a commercial pig: longer-legged, more mobile, with a distinctive metabolism that allows it to store fat not in a subcutaneous layer but intramuscularly, distributed through the muscle tissue in fine, even marbling. For a Cinco Jotas ham, both parents must be 100% Iberian. No shortcuts on genetics.
Second, the ecosystem. The dehesa (the semi-wild oak forest that covers these sierra slopes) is a centuries-old human-managed landscape of encinas (holm oaks), alcornoques (cork oaks), and quejigos (gall oaks), simultaneously farm and forest and wildlife habitat, declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. This is where the pigs live.
Third, the montanera. From October through March, the pigs roam the dehesa eating almost exclusively bellotas (acorns). During this season, a single pig eats roughly twelve kilos of acorns per day to gain one kilo of weight, and walks up to fourteen kilometers daily in the process of finding them. The resulting intramuscular fat (charged with oleic acid from the acorns, distributed through the muscle in a marbling that melts at body temperature) produces a flavor unlike anything generated by any other pig, anywhere. After slaughter, the hams are salted, then hung in natural-air bodegas for three to five years. The bodega air at Jabugo has its own specific microbial ecology (specific molds, specific temperature cycles, specific humidity swings) that develops flavor compounds during the curing. You can’t replicate this in a climate-controlled warehouse in a different location.
Cinco Jotas (5J, the name surviving from a now-defunct quality grading system as the brand's identity) was founded in Jabugo in 1879 by three partners and is currently part of the Osborne Group, best known for sherry and premium food products. It is among the most famous in Spain and offers daily guided tours of their curing cellars by advance booking.
Our guide led us through the interactive museum. I learned that Cinco Jotas pigs walk the equivalent of a half-marathon daily during montanera. And a few other interesting tidbits that I won’t bore you with. Then into the bodega itself: room after room of hanging hams, floor to ceiling, thousands of them, the air dense with a complex smell I would describe as what your brain imagines when it reads the word "excellent." Each ham is checked with a cala (a horse-bone needle, porous enough to absorb and release scent without contaminating the ham) telling the jamonero exactly where in the curing process each leg stands. After five minutes in this room, I was involuntarily salivating.
The tasting: thin-sliced at room temperature, with a glass of oloroso sherry. The fat glistens and melts on contact with your tongue before you've properly chewed. The flavor is nutty, sweet, deeply savory, with a finish that keeps unfolding rather than stopping, a depth that makes Prosciutto di Parma seem like a rough draft. Not unlike a great aged cheese, except the finish is entirely clean. Each piece with a slightly different taste, depending on where on the leg it was cut from. It is one of the best things I have eaten anywhere.
Gruta de las Maravillas: Marvelous indeed!
Thirty minutes back east we stopped in Aracena for a visit to Gruta de las Maravillas. This was also booked in advance. Frankly, I was a bit reluctant. The entrance is right in the middle of town, and after the previous cave experience in Gibraltar, I was not expecting much. Boy, was I proven wrong! It is easily the best cave I have ever visited. 100% recommend the experience. Just know that photos and videos are not allowed. Wink, wink, if you get my gist by now.
The cave is under the hill in the center of Aracena. You enter from a street between a café and a ham shop (in the context of this sierra, the most plausible urban setting imaginable) descend a staircase, and join a guided group tour that lasts approximately 30-45 minutes and covers about 1.2 kilometers.
The cave was first officially documented in 1886. Local legend attributes discovery to a shepherd whose sheep wandered into the entrance, which is precisely the kind of origin story a cave called the Cave of Wonders deserves. It opened to the public in 1914, making it the first show cave in Spain, and has been meticulously maintained ever since, which partly explains its extraordinary condition.
I am going to attempt a brief description, but not even the pictures can do it justice. You just have to experience it in person.
The Sala de los Brillantes (Hall of Brilliants): the first large chamber, stalactites of exceptional delicacy and translucency illuminated from below so they glow amber and white, the ceiling appearing to be encrusted with light made solid. You think you understand the scale and then you turn and discover you've been looking at only a third of the room.
The Sala de los Garbanzos (Hall of Chickpeas): the floor and lower walls covered in tiny spherical calcite nodules, each one a perfect sphere formed by calcium carbonate precipitating around a grain of sand in slowly rotating underground pools. The floor appears to have been laid with white gravel by someone with extraordinary patience. It was laid by groundwater over approximately twenty thousand years.
The Gran Lago (Great Lake): the most arresting of the tour. A subterranean lake, the water a mineral turquoise made vivid by the indirect lighting (the color caused by dissolved calcium and magnesium carbonate at specific concentrations) perfectly still, reflecting the stalactite formations above it with mirror precision. The total height of this chamber from lake floor to vault is 70 meters. The stalactites above and their reflections below create a doubled world of equal complexity, and standing at the edge of the walkway looking into it, you have the clear sensation of looking down into something very deep rather than up at something very tall. Both are true simultaneously.
Three consecutive lakes follow, connected by passages, each a slightly different color (the mineral turquoise of the Gran Lago, then a paler jade, then a near-white) with the reflections in each one creating their doubled versions of the geology above.
The Cristalería de Dios (God's Crystal Gallery): an entirely different geological vocabulary from the stalactites. Cave coral. Calcium carbonate deposited from supersaturated water, precipitating in response to micro-changes in CO₂ concentration, growing outward from the rock face in response to cave air currents, branching and irregular and completely indifferent to gravity. They look, in the lighting, as if a coral reef were mounted on the wall and the water had retreated, leaving the structure intact.
Just before 7pm, we were the last group out.
At this point, the waning light urges you to spend the evening in Aracena itself. The hilltop castle and Priory Church of Nuestra Señora del Mayor Dolor (the same hill the cave runs under) are worth the brief climb for the views. The town has good restaurants. Try the local presa ibérica or any of the cured products from the surrounding sierra. Jesus Carrion, Mesón El Postigo and Rincón de Juan all came with great recommendations. Stay the night if you can; the sierra at dusk, after the day-trippers have gone home, has a particular quiet that rewards lingering.
We did not stay the night, but before heading out, another “hydration” stop in the main Arecana square, which was already starting to get busy, with all the locals enjoying a nice Saturday evening, a cold beer and - of course - ibérico in any imaginable form. Cheers!
A little over an hour later, we were in our hotel literally across the street from Italica. The initial plan was to visit the Roman ruins the next morning, but since the itinerary was altered “on the fly” the day before, and our hotel in Seville did not have availability for that night, we had to stop at Hotel Anfiteatro Romano.
What an overpriced dump of a hotel. The front door had three stars on it, but I would barely give it one. Old. Musty. Paper-thin walls (I could hear actual conversations) and overall a huge disappointment. But it’s the only hotel in the area, unfortunately. And on a positive note, the food was spot on! The pluma de bellota was outstanding! I won’t be able to eat pork in the States any more…
Tomorrow: Seville, the car goes back, and the Andalucía portion of the trip converts from road trip to city stay.
Practical Notes: Day 11
Itálica: Free for EU citizens with proof of nationality; €1.50 for all others. One of the best value-to-experience ratios on the entire trip. Open Tuesday to Saturday (closed Monday); hours vary by season. Allow 90 minutes. Don’t skip the Roman theatre nearby. No booking required. The 170A bus from Seville's Plaza de Armas station takes 30 minutes; by car it's a 15-minute drive north of the city.
Cinco Jotas: Bodega tour with tasting, approximately 60 minutes, €28 per person. Book at www.cincojotas.com. Restaurant Las Bellotas, directly opposite the bodega, where we enjoyed (you guessed it) more secreto, is a reliable lunch option; traditional food, good products, reasonable prices.
Alternatively, Jamones Eíriz offers a more intimate, working-bodega visit. Less scripted, more sensory, where you walk through the curing rooms and see the process up close, unvarnished and quietly authentic. There are many other producers in the area as well.
Short detours in the Aracena area, time permitting: Cartagena and Almonaster la Real
Gruta de las Maravillas: Book in advance at turismoaracena.es. Tours run every 30 minutes, groups of approximately 25 people, and weekends sell out. Combination ticket with the Ham Museum and Aracena Castle. No photos or video inside. Bring a light jacket. 16–19°C and 98% humidity is colder than it sounds once you've been in there for 20 minutes. The cave is in the center of Aracena, walkable from anywhere in town. Open year-round except Christmas and New Year.
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