Cáceres has two faces. The modern city spreads over the plain with shopping streets, apartment blocks and ring roads, and it is a normal busy Spanish provincial capital. Inside it, behind medieval walls, lies the old quarter, which is one of the best-preserved in Europe and has been a World Heritage Site since 1986. Here stand towers, palaces and churches of golden stone, built between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries by noble families who had made money in the wars of the reconquest and later in the Americas. Many of the towers were cut down to the level of the roofs on the order of the Catholic Monarchs, who wanted to curb the power of the nobility, and the stumps are still visible.
Storks nest on almost every tall building, and in spring the clatter of their beaks echoes across the plazas. The cobbled lanes inside the walls are closed to most traffic, so it is another place to park the bike outside and walk in. Late in the afternoon, when the stone turns amber and the tourists thin out, the old town is at its best, and it has been used as a film location several times for exactly this reason.
Food here is of the hearty, rural kind. The nearby village of Casar de Cáceres is the home of Torta del Casar, a soft, pungent sheep's cheese made with thistle rennet, which you eat by cutting off the top and scooping it out with a spoon. Iberian ham, lamb stews and peppery sausages are on every menu. The countryside around the city is dehesa, open woodland of holm oak, with granite outcrops and herds of black pigs, and the roads that cross it are quiet, with gentle undulations and views across the plain.
With over ninety thousand people, Cáceres has no shortage of fuel or services, and the stations are plentiful along the ring road. Summers are very hot, and a morning start is the sensible way to ride this part of the Ruta de la Plata, while spring and autumn are comfortable all day. A coffee on the Plaza Mayor, just outside the old walls, is a good way to prepare for the next leg.