A Road Trip to Michelin-Starred Restaurants in Rural Spain

Entering Zarza de Granadilla, my first thought was that chef Alejandro Hernández Talaván had his work cut out for him. The town of 1,800 baked silently in the July sun, its streets empty, the curtains of beads that covered the doorways of its houses static in the breezeless day. It was not the kind of place that builds an appetite.

And yet, I was here, a three hours’ drive west of Madrid in Extremadura, to eat. Months earlier, I’d heard rumors of thoughtful chefs who were rejecting the busy gastronomic scenes of Barcelona or San Sebastián to open ambitious restaurants in tiny pueblos. Now, my friend David and I were on a six-day road trip that would take us 1,300 miles around the northern half of Spain to visit five of them.

Distant view of historic building among stone walls and trees — In addition to offering two tasting menus, Versátil serves more informal fare such as paella and carpaccio in its downstairs bodega, which also functions as an art gallery.

Of course, I wanted to know whether the restaurants were good. But more intriguing to me were the people behind them. Having spent considerable time in rural Spain, I knew that many areas were being hollowed out by depopulation, with residents abandoning their towns for job opportunities in the big cities, and depleting the shops, schools, and clinics that had once made village life possible. The phenomenon is so common—in the last 15 years, more than 80 percent of towns in Spain have lost population—that there’s a name for it: la España vaciada, or emptied Spain. What, I wondered, would compel an ambitious chef to turn away from the opportunities of a city in favor of a village most people had never heard of? How did they manage to find ingredients, staff, and most of all, customers? And what effects were they having on the villages themselves?

Aerial view of Granadilla on peninsula (L); three men: chef in white in center, with two brothers in dark blue (R) — Abandoned in the 1960s, the fortress village of Granadilla is worth a visit for its well-preserved castle and ghost-town feel; chef Alejandro Hernández Talaván (pictured, center) runs Versátil with his two brothers, José and David.

Versátil (Zarza de Granadilla, Extremadura)

Strolling through Zarza de Granadilla at midday may have felt like wandering onto the set of the shoot-out scene in High Noon, but once David and I stepped inside Versátil, we were sucked into a convivial hodgepodge of brick walls, houndstooth fabric, and enthusiastic Spanish guests. We started with a crisp glass of wine made from the local alarije grape, then embarked on a tasting menu that displayed elements of Spain’s modernist culinary revolution (canapés topped with squid ink gel) but was firmly rooted in Extremadura’s flavors (Ibérico pork, smoky pimenton, cherries bursting with juice). A carpaccio made from the tender meat of an Ibérico pig that had spent months eating acorns from regional oaks was showered in shards of tangy sheep’s milk cheese and dolloped with ice cream spun from local olive oil. With each course, I felt myself settling deeper into the landscape.

“We feel a responsibility not to lose our tradition,” chef Alejandro Hernández Talaván said. “And our legacy is to respect our ingredients.”

Alejandro runs the restaurant with his brothers, David and José. All three left Zarza as teens—Alejandro to train with chef Martín Berasategui outside San Sebastián, José to a bank job, David to Madrid’s dining rooms. But when they started dreaming of their own restaurant, they agreed there was only one place it could be: home.

Overhead view of tiled roof of building casting dark shadow over half of dirt path, with one person on edge of shadow and light — Versátil earned a Michelin star in 2021.

They weren’t naive. With no fine dining precedent in the town, the brothers hedged their bets when they opened in 2017 by adding a casual spot in the downstairs bodega, where locals could drop by for croquetas and a glass of wine. Yet as Versátil’s reputation spread, visitors started coming from farther afield. These days, it’s a mix of diners from the nearby cities of Plasencia or Salamanca; travelers passing through; and locals who celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, or—especially since Versátil earned a Michelin star in 2021—bring out-of-town guests. “I think people like to be able to show off that they have a place like this here,” Hernández said.

That’s not the only effect. Versátil’s 18 staff members, most newcomers to the town, have boosted the population; spare apartments are rented to tourists on countryside breaks. Producers from the area, including young cheese makers and a brewery that flavors its beers with local cherries, have a new market. “We’ve become an economic motor for the county,” Hernández said.

Table topped with five dark brown bottles of beer, openers, caps, and plastic glasses holding small pours of beer — Part of Versátil’s mission is sourcing goods and ingredients from local producers, including Extremadura beer.

As he bade us farewell, the chef insisted we visit the neighboring hilltop town of Granadilla but wouldn’t tell us why. Once through its medieval walls, we found narrow lanes that led in one direction to a viewpoint over a vast blue lake below and, in another, opened onto an arcaded plaza perfect for markets and evening strolls. There were no tourists.

In fact, there was no one at all. Granadilla had been abandoned in 1965 when its 1,000 residents were evicted and relocated to make way for a dam. This, I realized, was why Hernández urged us to visit: He had sent us to a ghost town to show us what was at stake.

Hand pouring syrup over square of food on rustic plate (L); woman embracing man in white chef shirt in doorway (R) — Monte is run by chef Xune Andrade, who is joined in the restaurant by his sister Lorena (pictured).

Monte (San Feliz, Asturias)

The next morning, David and I drove north through a few hours of dusty flatness until we reached a long tunnel. On the other side lay lush green mountains strung with misty fog. We had reached Asturias, a region on Spain’s Atlantic coast where the climate is cool and wet enough that cider, rather than wine, is the drink of choice.

Continuing off the highway for a mile, we parked at the edge of San Feliz, population 23, then walked the 300 feet or so to a jumble of stone houses and a sheep pen that constituted the village. In its center, we found a handsome wooden door with a Michelin placard affixed to it.

Through it stepped Xune Andrade, the chef of the restaurant Monte. As we sat down to chat on the terrace, he pointed across the highway to the coal-mining town of Pola de Lena, where he grew up. In his late teens, Andrade left to study economics in the city of Oviedo. But one glimpse at the textbooks convinced him to switch to culinary school, and later, to train at the nearby Casa Gerardo, one of the region’s most acclaimed restaurants. “I didn’t even know what a Michelin star was,” he said of that time. “But cooking became my passion.”

That passion led him to culinary positions at renowned restaurants in Girona, Valencia, and Madrid. But eventually, he found himself longing for his place of origin. “Being in Madrid made me feel even more attached to my home,” he said. “And I wanted to live somewhere calm.” When a village pub came up for sale in San Feliz, he bought it in 2019, along with the house next door.

Smiling staff person at tall table, with kitchen shelves in background (L); a few houses, with hills in distance (R) — Monte offers two tasting menus and—befitting of the area—a cider-pairing option as well as the traditional wine pairing. Delia Melgarejo, Monte’s sommelier (pictured) manages both.

White Michelin figurine with yellow sash on table topped by food — Accolades like the Michelin star, first earned in 2022, have brought a steady stream of diners to Monte.

A fine-dining restaurant in coal-mining country was “unthinkable,” Andrade said. So he initially opened Monte as a tapas bar, adding burgers and pizza during its weekend parties. But the pandemic changed things. When Monte reopened after lockdown, distancing restrictions meant Andrade would have to raise prices to make up for having fewer customers—hard to do on burgers and pizza. Instead, he switched to a tasting menu and started delving into the local cuisine.

For Andrade, local means the 12 miles or so outside his kitchen door. Free-range chicken is raised in San Feliz; Andrade’s “best friend from forever,” who bought the house next door to him, provides the lamb; and the trout comes from a river down the road. He forages for the mushrooms himself.

Accolades like his Michelin star, first earned in 2022, have brought a steady stream of diners to the restaurant, allowing Monte to inject new resources into the local economy. “Ninety-five percent of our guests come from outside,” Andrade said. “And 90 percent of our expenses are local.”

Once we sat down to eat, it became clear that Andrade is interested in showcasing not only the area’s ingredients but also its culinary culture. The meal started with the most typical of Asturian snacks—a bollo preñao (pregnant bun) stuffed with smoky chorizo and accompanied by housemade vermouth—and progressed through renditions of the region’s classic recipes, from pote asturiano, a hearty bean stew, to a pasta stuffed with slow-cooked lamb and blanketed in a savory sheep’s-milk cream. Andrade works so creatively that none of it felt stodgy: The bread, for example, is made from nutty Asturian spelt, but, in a tribute to the area’s historic industry, tinted black with charcoal.

The immersion into place continued through to the typical Asturian dessert, filloas, whose shatter-thin sheets of pastry are layered with sweetened cream. Here, the cream came dotted with candied figs and dolloped with a scoop of black ice cream. I suspected that this, too, was intended as another homage to the coal that once defined San Feliz. But Andrade’s sister Lorena, a waiter at the restaurant, pointed to the name of the dish on the menu.

The dessert was called Granadilla 1952. It was named after the place and year of their father’s birth—the very ghost town we’d visited. He had left Extremadura to find work in Asturias’s coal mines and died a few months before his son earned the Michelin star. Andrade, too, had inherited the trauma of abandoned villages. It made me think about how personal this kind of restaurant was: as much a story about family as it is about place.

Man in brown apron standing next to table of two diners (L); row of houses on narrow street (R) — Chef Edorta Lamo (pictured) opened Arrea! in 2018.

Arrea! (Kanpezu, Basque Country)

Family is what lured Edorta Lamo to Kanpezu (population 700) in the hilly interior of the Basque Country, a three-and-a-half-hour drive east from San Feliz. Before we sat down in the dining room of his restaurant, Arrea!, he told us about the first Lamo to arrive in the area in 1460—and about his grandparents, who opened a bar there in 1950. Although he grew up in Vitoria-Gasteiz after his parents moved there, and he eventually opened a highly regarded pintxos bar in San Sebastián, Lamo never forgot the idyllic weekends and holidays he spent with his grandparents. Once he became a father, the pull of the pueblo grew stronger. “I started to think I would never forgive myself if I didn’t give my son the chance to grow up with the same sense of freedom and community that I had,” he said.

Overhead view of tiny snacks on square and round plates on dark wooden table top — Arrea! has multiple dining spaces. The main dining room offers the most extensive gastronomic option, including a picnic of preserves, cheeses, and meats, followed by a minimum of three selections of wild fish and game.

In 2014, he bought the old building that would, in 2018, become Arrea! and began learning from local elders how, in a town where hunger was once a frequent threat, many Kanpezu families survived through furtivismo—poaching game, wild plants, and even firewood from the surrounding mountains. “It generated a lot of shame,” Lamo said. “And that made me want to give something back to the people here. I wanted to show them the richness we have around us.”

Pantry shelves with jars and bottles of food and small glass-fronted refrigerator holding sausages — Arrea! showcases hyperlocal foods, including vegetables, herbs, and flowers foraged from the woods.

Richness was an understatement. After a server stretched a checked cloth across our table, Lamo laid down a bounty as the opening course in a tasting menu. Among the 20 or so dishes was a pastrami of wild boar, a ruby-colored tranche of squab cured in beeswax, and a plate of pickled plants that included both cultivated vegetables and herbs and flowers foraged from the woods. “Olives” were cured green cherries; crunchy “breadsticks” were dried lamb intestines. In a nod to old lotteries that divided firewood rights, fermented apple leather dusted with lichen was rolled to look like tree branches. What once were poverty foods—acorns, weeds, lichen—emerged as delicacies. Arrea! was awarded a Michelin star in 2022.

As we ate, I considered that Lamo wasn’t just showcasing the hyperlocal. He was also demonstrating the beauty and worth of even the humblest ingredients. And in doing so, he was bringing dignity to a subsistence cuisine that had long been dismissed.

Aerial view of village in mountain valley (L); head and arms of person behind tall wood counter (R) — Iris Jordán (pictured) took over her grandmother’s restaurant, Ansils, with her brother Bruno.

Ansils (Anciles, Aragon)

The next day, after a four hours’ drive to the northeast, David and I were back in the mountains. We passed the lively town of Benasque, with its many shops catering to outdoor sports, and soon came to a clutch of stone buildings. With just 18 residents, Anciles was even tinier than San Feliz. But when chef Iris Jordán, who had worked in prestigious establishments in Madrid, was ready to go into business with her brother Bruno, they never considered an alternative. Iris had been cooking here since she was a young girl.

The siblings’ grandmother, Pilarín, had opened a restaurant in the 1980s to cater to Anciles’s then-newly arriving ski tourists. At her side, Iris, who grew up in the town, learned to cook over an open hearth and to prepare dishes such as recado, the stew characteristic of the region. After leaving at 17 to work in various restaurants, she returned to Anciles in 2019 to cook with her grandmother. Eventually, she began introducing some of her own dishes to the older woman’s repertoire until finally, the two siblings took over the place and rebranded it as a fine-dining restaurant in 2022.

Brown sauce being poured on small ceramic bowl of greens with two tiny violet-colored flowers — Ansils earned a Michelin star in 2024.

On the day we visited, Iris had laryngitis, so Bruno, who oversees the front of house, did most of the talking. “In the past, our products and our recipes were denigrated because they were so simple and mostly made with preserved ingredients,” Bruno said. “Summer was short, and the rest of the year, fresh ingredients couldn’t reach here. But that, we realized, could be its own magic.”

One of the starters, crunchy cockscomb (a tribute to the treat that, as kids, Bruno and Iris would fight over), was served with a kimchi of vegetables that grew outside the door. The boiled green beans and potatoes that once supplied two meals—the vegetables for lunch; the water they were cooked in for a dinner broth—were transformed into a deeply flavorful soup, with beans julienned so thin they acted as noodles. Seafood made its singular appearance as bacalao, the cod that was salted and dried into hardened planks to be hauled over the mountains once a year as a Christmas treat.

Five people outside historic three-story stone building — Stone mansions in the town of Anciles were constructed during the 17th century by families of wealthy ranchers.

With its 2024 Michelin star drawing guests outside the summer and winter high seasons, Ansils is also having an effect on the greater community. The restaurant buys vegetables from its neighbors’ small gardens, and when Iris told her friend Alvarito that she was hoping to serve one dish in wooden bowls, he bought a lathe and—though he had never worked with wood before—started making them himself. The week we arrived, the siblings scheduled a visit for their staff to meet Zacarías, a 25-year-old shepherd who not only provides the restaurant’s lamb but also has started a school teaching the traditional herding methods.

After lunch, Iris joined us in the garden. I asked what made her proudest, and she pointed to the inspiration that Ansils might offer to other young chefs. “We’ve shown it’s possible to be in a small place,” she said. “To do what you love, to be valued as much as if it were in the city.”

Woman and man on black outdoor chairs, with stone and brick walls behind them (L); row of wine bottles beneath small window with wood shutters (R) — Alejandro Paz and Olga García (pictured) opened the restaurant Fuentelgato in 2023.

Fuentelgato (Huerta del Marquesado, Castile-La Mancha)

David and I had one last stop to make. The next day, after a morning spent driving through the austere mesa of eastern Spain, we paused for lunch in the village of Huerta del Marquesado (population 173). Alejandro Paz and Olga García, who previously worked in Michelin-starred establishments in Valencia, had in 2020 created their restaurant Fuentelgato in the bar once owned by Olga’s parents—the only way the couple could afford to open their own place.

With a small dining room of mismatched tables and cookbook-lined shelves, Fuentelgato felt almost like eating in someone’s home, albeit someone who knows how to turn earthy nettles into a delicately flaky empanada, drape fat-grilled oysters in lardo, and dress a perfectly poached egg in a sabayon made richer still with a dollop of caviar. It was a delicious, accomplished meal.

Due to a dearth of nearby producers, the two chefs instead emphasize seasonality and change their menu every few weeks. As a result, there are no fixed courses, just two tasting menus that center instinct, flexibility, and time.

Two hands holding plate of food over dark table top — Fuentelgato emphasizes seasonality with a menu that changes every few weeks.

“In other places where there are producers around, a restaurant like ours could nourish them,” Paz said. “We don’t have that here, but [thanks to the restaurant] we’ve gone from being a town that gets 200 or 300 visitors a year to one that gets 3,000. And those people go out to buy bread, they stay in casas rurales (country cottages), and in the end they have an impact on the businesses that already existed here.”

Fuentelgato was much simpler than the other four restaurants we visited. But between the quality of the cooking and the accolades it was receiving from the Spanish press, it was easy to imagine that with it, Paz and García were planting the seeds from which a gastronomic culture might grow.

As we drove away from Huerta del Marquesado, I still wasn’t sure that the restaurants were going to be able to turn the tide for la España vaciada. But each was proving that thrilling creativity could come from limits; each was using cooking to make an argument about memory, resilience, and belonging. And in an age in which globalization threatens to flatten our differences, each was not just preserving but also actively celebrating that rarest of things: a distinct identity.

Cloudy dusk over hills with trees — Fuentelgato is adjacent to Serranía de Cuenca Natural Park, known for its “Enchanted City” of naturally sculpted limestone formations, which resemble animals and human faces.

How to Take This Trip

There’s nothing quite like driving through the northern half of Spain to remind you of the power of regional identity. Embark on a clockwise circle of a road trip that begins and ends in Madrid, and each autonomous community will feel like arriving in a new country: Not only does the cuisine change dramatically, but so does the landscape, architecture, and sometimes even the language.

Extremadura

A three-hour drive west from the Madrid airport, Extremadura is known for its cherry orchards and ancient Roman towns. Visit Zarza de Granadilla to dine at Versátil (tasting menu from $90) and then drive six miles to the ghost town of Granadilla for its medieval castle. Fifteen miles east, Hervás cradles a group of half-timbered homes that once comprised its Jewish quarter and is capped by a 13th-century church built atop the ruins of a fortress. A hotel dating to the 19th century, El Jardín del Convento (doubles from $82) is a bit younger but still full of character, thanks to wooden beams and a wisteria-covered terrace.

Asturias

Head three-and-a-half hours north along the A-66 highway and pass the stately university city of Salamanca before entering the mountains of Asturias and arriving at Monte (tasting menu from $113). There is a delightful casa rural in the town of San Feliz, but Hotel Narbasu (doubles from $173), just under an hour’s drive east, offers more luxury with rural-chic interiors and spectacular views of the Picos de Europa mountain range. From here, it’s a short drive to the mountain town of Cangas de Onís, and from there, around 12 minutes up to the village of Covadonga, whose church commemorates the start of medieval Christian Spain’s reconquest of Muslim territory. Covadonga also acts as entryway to the alpine Picos de Europa National Park.

Cantabria and the Basque Country

The A-8 highway from Asturias skirts the edge of the Cantabrian Sea for about three hours (break it up with a stop at Museo de Altamira, which offers a full-scale replica of the nearby Altamira Paleolithic cave paintings) before intersecting with the road that heads inland to the rural town of Kanpezu. At Arrea! you can choose from the bountiful tasting menu in the dining room for $187, or a more casual menu just off the bar for $69. Twenty-five miles west, the centuries-old Palacio de Samaniego (doubles from $230) has nine exquisitely curated rooms and a Basque fine-dining restaurant of its own.

Navarre and Aragon

About an hour east of Kanpezu in the Navarre region, Pamplona makes a lively stop even outside of the San Fermín Festival and its running of the bulls. Hemingway fans will want to visit Café Iruña (where Hemingway had coffee each morning) and the Gran Hotel La Perla (where he stayed). From Pamplona, it’s another three-and-a-half hours to Anciles, in the Aragonese Pyrenees. The town itself is picturesque, but will take all of about eight minutes to walk through; lunch at the restaurant Ansils (tasting menu from $100) is a much more leisurely affair. In nearby Benasque, distinctive Pyrenees stone houses share the streets with outdoor-gear shops and bustling cafés filled with recovering hikers and cyclists. For a quiet drink—to say nothing of more eccentric decor—check out Rabason bar. At the Hotel Selba d’Ansils (doubles from $122), just up the road from Anciles, the elegantly furnished rooms, several with Jacuzzis, overlook a verdant lawn and the peaks beyond it.

Castile–La Mancha

Break up the five-and-a-half-hour drive south to the province of Cuenca with a stop at the baroque cathedral of Zaragoza, whose impressively ornate dome contains a fresco by Goya, before lunch at Fuentelgato (tasting menu from $105) in Huerta del Marquesado. About an hour west on the way back to Madrid, Cuenca is a beautifully preserved medieval city renowned for its contemporary art museums and houses that dangle perilously over the surrounding gorges. The Posada de San José, creaky but charming (doubles from $117), is one of the oldest inns in Spain.

Lisa Abend

Based in Copenhagen, Lisa Abend is a freelance journalist specializing in travel, food, and culture. She contributes regularly to Afar, the New York Times, and Time magazine, and her work has appeared in numerous international publications. She also writes The Unplugged Traveler, her newsletter where she documents her travels throughout Europe without using the internet. Through her reporting, Abend brings readers thoughtful, firsthand stories that highlight both global destinations and the people who shape them.