Monfragüe

Monfragüe is a river fight frozen in rock: the Tagus, already broad by central Extremadura, saws through a line of Paleozoic quartzite ridges, and the breach — mons fragorum, the Romans' "dense mountain" — funnels the river past leaning slabs of stone that hold the greatest concentration of cliff-breeding raptors in Europe. The set piece is the Salto del Gitano, the sheer face opposite the Peñafalcón crag: several hundred pairs of griffon vultures ride its updrafts within binocular-filling range of a roadside viewpoint, sharing the rock with eagle owls, black storks and peregrines. Up in the ridge-top cork oaks nest the park's aristocracy — the world's largest breeding colony of black vultures and a solid population of Spanish imperial eagles, the planet's rarest.

The park, a paraje natural from 1979 and Spain's fourteenth national park in 2007, is small on the map but borrows its ecology from the enormous private dehesas around it: the wood-pasture of scattered holm oaks, grazing and montanera pigs that covers half of Extremadura and feeds the vultures their carrion economy. Monfragüe protects the breeding cliffs; the dehesa is the supermarket. It is the standing Spanish example of a protected core working only because the cultural landscape around it still functions.

People have watched from these rocks for a long time. The castle on the summit ridge is ninth-century Moorish work over earlier bones, a two-tower ruin with the whole park map laid out beneath it; the cave below the castle path keeps schematic Bronze Age paintings behind a grille. The park's only settlement, Villarreal de San Carlos, is an eighteenth-century colonization hamlet of Carlos III — founded to guard the road against bandits, now a two-street village entirely converted to visitor centres and terraces where azure-winged magpies raid the tables.

What's worth knowing before you go

The park hangs off the EX-208 between Plasencia and Torrejón el Rubio, and a car is effectively required; the classic day is the string of signed viewpoints — Salto del Gitano, La Tajadilla, Portilla del Tiétar, where the imperial eagles are most often scoped — plus the castle climb from Villarreal. Beds are in Torrejón el Rubio, Malpartida de Plasencia or Plasencia itself. Come between February and June: vulture courtship starts in winter, the storks are on the nests by March, and the dehesa is green and full of cranes' leavings — by August the thermometer passes forty and the hills are ash-blond. La Portilla del Tiétar at dusk earns the wait when the eagle owl starts calling.

The connoisseur's detail: the Salto del Gitano griffons come past at eye level in the first hour after sunrise, before the thermals lift them a thousand metres — the difference between a wildlife encounter and a distant kettle is simply arriving before nine.