Armchair Travels: Spain & Portugal - Where the Sheep Roamed

The Landscape & Wool Heritage of Spain and Portugal

If you've ever wondered why Iberian wool feels the way it does in your hands, the answer starts long before any sheep was sheared. It starts with the land itself, and with the long, dusty roads that flocks have been walking for nearly a thousand years.

This is the story of how two countries on one peninsula grew up around their sheep.

Two Climates, One Peninsula

Iberia is a patchwork quilt of contrasting landscapes.

Sheep grazing on the Spanish meseta, a high plateau known for its dry climate and open grasslands.
I, Ruud Zwart, CC BY-SA 2.5 NL, via Wikimedia Commons

The interior of Spain is a high, dry plateau called the Meseta, baked by summer heat and scoured by winter winds. The Meseta's heartland is a region called Castilla-La Mancha, the sun-bleached plateau south and east of Madrid where Cervantes set Don Quixote and where the white windmills he mistook for giants still turn on the ridgelines.

The Atlantic edges of both countries, by contrast, are wet, green, and mild. The Pyrenees rise sharp in the north. The Serra da Estrela, Portugal's highest range, catches snow in winter and shelters villages that have been making cheese and wool for centuries.

The sheep that thrived here were the ones that could handle extremes: long walks between pastures, hot summers, cold winters, sparse grazing. The wool they grew reflects all of it. Iberian fleeces tend to run a little drier, a little more characterful, a little less of the buttery softness people associate with modern commercial Merino. They behave honestly. They breathe. They wear in rather than wear out.

The landscape didn't just shape the sheep, it shaped the entire way Iberians lived with them.

Spain's Pyrenees Mountains helped shape the seasonal rhythm of Iberian shepherding, giving flocks high summer pastures before the long walk back down.

The Mesta and the Ninety-Varas Road

In 1273, King Alfonso X of Castile granted special privileges to a guild of sheep owners called the Honrado Concejo de la Mesta, the Honored Council of the Mesta. For the next five centuries, the Mesta would be one of the most powerful institutions in Spain, and the reason was simple: wool was the country's gold.

What followed was the most organized system of transhumance, the seasonal walking of flocks between summer and winter pastures, that Europe had ever seen.

A Merino ewe stands at the heart of Spain's wool history, carrying the fine fleece that once made the breed one of the country's greatest treasures.
Jybet, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Merino sheep, the fine-fleeced breed that would eventually clothe much of the world, could not stay in one place year-round, because the Meseta ran too hot in summer and too cold in winter. So twice a year, vast flocks were walked north in spring and south in autumn, following ancient routes between mountain pastures and lowland meadows. These routes were called cañadas reales, royal drovers' roads, and the Mesta saw to it that they were protected by law. 

The principal cañadas reales were set at ninety varas wide, about seventy-five meters, to allow large flocks to move across the landscape.
LBM1948, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The principal cañadas were declared to be ninety varas wide (a vara is roughly an old Castilian yard), which comes to about seventy-five meters across: an extraordinary corridor reserved entirely for moving sheep. Farmers could not plough them and towns could not encroach on them, because the flocks held right of passage, and that right was enforced by the crown.

Picture for a moment, thousands of sheep moving in a slow river across the Spanish countryside, accompanied by shepherds, dogs, mules, and sometimes the shepherds' families, walking the same routes their grandparents had walked. Some of the longer cañadas stretched more than five hundred miles and took weeks to complete, with the shepherds sleeping under the stars and the sheep eating as they went.

During the 2025 Transhumance Celebration, sheep filled the streets of Spain in a living reminder that these ancient drovers' roads still matter.
Javier Perez Montes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Astonishingly, many of these routes still exist today. Spain's cañadas reales form a legally protected network of more than 78,000 miles of drovers' roads, and a handful of shepherds still walk them. In 1994, one shepherd famously drove his flock straight through the center of Madrid, exercising a right of passage that predated the city in its modern form. He did it again the following year, and the year after that, and the tradition is now annual.

This is the heritage that built Iberian wool: pastoral in the literal, walking, weather-beaten sense, with centuries of footsteps and seasons behind every fleece.

Made from 100% transhumant Merino wool, WoolDreamers 90 Varas connects each skein to Spain's historic sheep roads and centuries of shepherding tradition.

Knit with Transhumant Merino

Portugal's Parallel Story

Serra da Estrela, Portugal rises with the same rugged beauty that has sheltered mountain sheep, shepherds, cheesemakers, and wool traditions for centuries.

Portugal never had a Mesta, because it was a smaller country with a different political shape, and its wool culture developed more locally, village by village and valley by valley. Transhumance, though, was every bit as essential. Shepherds in the Serra da Estrela walked their flocks between high summer pastures and lowland winter grazing just as Spanish shepherds did, and the country's native breeds shaped themselves around those journeys. The Bordaleira and Churra breeds adapted to mountain life, while the Campaniça and Saloia thrived in the warmer south and around Lisbon, and each region developed its own breed, its own wool character, and its own way of using fleece.

Snow-covered Serra da Estrela, Portugal shows the winter side of a landscape where hardy flocks and mountain villages have long worked with the seasons.

Where Spain organized its wool economy from the top down through the Mesta, Portugal's wool culture stayed close to the ground, with small mills, family flocks, and village-scale spinning and weaving. That difference still shows up today in how Spanish and Portuguese yarn producers work, but we'll save that for our fourth stop.

What Nearly Was Lost

Seen from above, a flock of sheep in Siurana, Girona, Spain becomes a moving pattern across the land, echoing centuries of pastoral routes.

For all this heritage, the twentieth century was hard on Iberian wool. Synthetic fibers arrived, cheap imported wool flooded the market, and native breeds were replaced with more productive foreign ones or simply abandoned as shepherds left the countryside for city work. In Spain, where hundreds of small mills once dotted the landscape, only a handful survived, and in Portugal, some native breeds slipped to fewer than a thousand animals. Wool that had clothed Europe for centuries was suddenly worth less than the cost of shearing it off the sheep.

The traditions held on quietly. A few shepherds kept walking the cañadas, a few mills kept spinning, and a few flocks of Xalda, Campaniça, and Saloia kept grazing in the places they had always grazed. Slowly, something started to change.

The Cañada Real Soriana Occidental, passing by Torrecaballeros, is part of Spain's historic network of protected sheep roads once used by vast traveling flocks.
Arturo Francisco Barbero, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

A new generation of shepherds, mill owners, and yarn producers started asking what would be lost if the native breeds disappeared, and the answer drew them back to the cañadas, the village mills, and the flocks their grandparents had kept. Across both countries, a small community of producers, shepherds, and designers started rebuilding what had nearly slipped away, working with the breeds and the mills that remained rather than chasing fashionable imports. The revival is still young and still small, but the yarn in our shop is part of it. We'll meet the people behind it at our fourth stop.

Why This Matters for Your Knitting

Castilla-La Mancha's windmills rise over the sun-baked plateau where Spanish sheep, shepherds, and stories have crossed paths for generations.

The Iberian wool you can knit with today exists because a generation of producers decided that this story was worth saving. When you cast on with Wooldreamers Mota, you're knitting wool from sheep raised in the shadow of the La Mancha windmills, on the same plateau the Mesta once walked, and when you wind a skein of Retrosaria Vovó, you're holding fleece from Campaniça sheep that have been grazing southern Portugal for centuries. These are heritage yarns in the most literal sense: heritage that someone chose to keep alive, fleece by fleece. That changes what you're holding when you cast on.

WoolDreamers Mota nods to Castilla-La Mancha with windmill artwork and the famous Don Quijote line, "No son gigantes, son molinos," meaning "They are not giants, they are windmills."

Follow the Windmills to Mota

In our next stop, we'll meet the sheep themselves: Merino, of course, but also the less famous breeds that make Iberian yarn what it is, and a small chorus of rare breeds being pulled back from the edge. We'll see you there!