Spanish White Villages & Cheese-Making

Leaving Seville, we traveled 4-5 hours through the Andalusian countryside of the Sierra de Grazalema — a UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve — and its famed white villages. Even though it is a mountainous region, it still gets very hot in summer (120 degrees), so the homes are painted white to keep cooler. Many of the villages had watchtowers for transmitting messages by smoke signals to villages along the mountaintops. It makes for very picturesque scenery!

This remote and rugged terrain allowed the town to employ guerrilla warfare tactics and put up notable resistance to French occupation during the War of Independence, when the town was occupied by Napoleon's troops between 1810 and 1812.

A highlight of the day was visiting a small artisan cheesemaker where we learned about the cheese-making process through a guided tour of their small museum and a video. Of course we got to taste the cheeses — all from either goat (Payoyo cheese) or sheep milk. We tasted various lengths of aging (younger, milder softer cheeses through firmer, tangier cheeses). In the old days, they would braid wheat to make the molds for the cheese; these days the molds are washable plastic, but still with the wheat pattern (see photo).Read more