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Until a few decades ago, nearly a hundred shepherds’ dwellings remained active in the Sierra de Gredos within the municipality of Candeleda. They were small enclaves where shepherds lived alongside their flocks, some throughout the year and others following the seasonal rhythm of the pastures, in a tradition whose roots reach back at least to the Middle Ages. Today, all of those shepherds’ dwellings have been abandoned, but Majada de Braguillas has been restored and opened to visitors to preserve the memory of this way of life and bring us closer to the hardship, knowledge, and self-sufficiency of the old goat herders.
Shepherds’ dwellings sustained large concentrations of domestic herbivores in these mountains until recent times. Flocks could include several hundred goats, animals particularly well adapted to steep slopes and capable of feeding on grasses, shoots, and shrublands inaccessible to other livestock. As had happened centuries earlier with the Vetton communities, this abundance of animals created a two-way relationship between people and nature: the shepherds depended on the mountain’s pastures, water, and seasonal cycles, while their flocks transformed the land through browsing, trampling, seed transport, and soil fertilisation. The mountain sustained the families and their animals, while they, in turn, helped maintain a mosaic landscape. Goat grazing can slow the spread of shrubland and, in the mountains around Gredos, goats and pastoral burning played a decisive role in shaping the historical landscape.
A shepherds’ dwelling was not simply a place where goats were kept, but a small family unit for living and working. It included the house, the enclosure, and the stables, as well as henhouses, pigsties, storage spaces, an oven, a vegetable garden, a spring, and a cool dairy where milk and cheese were prepared and preserved. Gradually built from granite, wood, and other local materials, these dwellings allowed families to live in the mountains, care for their livestock, produce food, and lead an almost self-sufficient life.
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