The Wool Road

For 500 years, the sheep of Spain walked 700 kilometers each year between summer and winter pastures. The roads they followed still cross the country. A few shepherds still walk them.

Transhumance — the seasonal movement of livestock between pastures — is practiced around the world. But nowhere was it organized on the scale of medieval Spain. The Mesta, a guild of sheep owners established in 1273, controlled a system that moved millions of sheep across the Iberian Peninsula each year. The roads they followed, the cañadas, formed a network that covered Spain like a second circulatory system.

The wool they produced clothed Europe. Spanish merino was the finest wool in the world, exported to Flanders and England and Italy, woven into cloth that made fortunes. For centuries, the wealth of Spain rested on four hooves.

The system collapsed. But the roads remain, and a few shepherds still walk them.

The System

The cañadas are ancient rights-of-way, legally protected corridors up to 75 meters wide that cross Spain from north to south. The sheep walked them twice a year — north in spring to summer pastures in the mountains, south in autumn to winter pastures on the plains. The journeys took weeks, covering 700 kilometers or more.

At its peak, the system moved 3 to 4 million sheep annually. The Mesta regulated everything: when herds could move, which routes they followed, how conflicts with farmers were resolved. The organization was powerful enough to override local authorities, to tear down fences that blocked the cañadas, to demand that its sheep be fed and watered along the way.

The wool justified the power. Spanish merino, bred over centuries for fiber quality, produced wool that no other sheep could match. The export taxes on wool were a major source of royal revenue. The sheep were, quite literally, the wealth of the nation moving across the landscape.

The Decline

The Mesta was abolished in 1836. The liberal reforms of the 19th century favored private property over communal grazing rights. The cañadas were encroached upon, built over, forgotten. The railroads made long-distance walking unnecessary. The sheep stopped moving.

Merino sheep spread around the world — to Australia, South Africa, Argentina — and Spanish wool lost its monopoly. The prices fell. The flocks shrank. The shepherds who had walked the cañadas for generations found other work or found nothing.

By the late 20th century, transhumance in Spain seemed finished. The cañadas existed on maps and in law but rarely on the ground. The few remaining shepherds used trucks, moving their animals quickly between pastures rather than walking for weeks. The tradition survived as memory, not practice.

The Revival

Something unexpected happened. As industrial agriculture revealed its environmental costs, the old ways began to look less obsolete. Grazing animals that moved across the landscape rather than concentrating in feedlots — this was not primitive agriculture. It was sustainable agriculture before the term existed.

The cañadas, it turned out, had ecological value. They functioned as wildlife corridors, connecting habitats fragmented by development. The traditional grazing prevented brush accumulation that fueled wildfires. The sheep dispersed seeds, fertilized soil, maintained landscapes that had coevolved with their presence for centuries.

Conservation organizations began promoting transhumance. The Spanish government recognized the cañadas as protected heritage. Some shepherds began walking their flocks again, partly from tradition, partly from principle, partly because it made a kind of sense that industrial methods did not.

The Walk

The shepherds who still walk are few — perhaps a dozen groups making the full journey each year. They leave in late spring, their flocks streaming along roads that cut through suburbs and farmland and mountains. The journey takes three to four weeks.

The work is hard. The shepherds walk all day, managing animals that want to scatter, navigating roads that sometimes barely exist, sleeping rough. They carry supplies on donkeys or in support vehicles. They depend on the hospitality of people along the route, on the survival of rights-of-way that developers would prefer to eliminate.

The flock provides its own rhythm. Sheep move at sheep pace — steady, unhurried, stopping to graze. The shepherds adapt. The journey cannot be rushed. The animals set the schedule, as they have for centuries.

The experience is transformative. Walkers who join the transhumance — journalists, students, the curious — describe something that modern life rarely provides: days measured by movement and weather, nights measured by stars and silence, a connection to landscape that driving through it never offers.

What Remains

The cañadas still cross Spain — 125,000 kilometers of legally protected routes, covering an area larger than some European countries. Most are overgrown, blocked, built upon. But they exist, in law if not always on the ground. Their protection means something, even if enforcement is imperfect.

The sheep still walk, in small numbers. Each autumn and spring, a handful of flocks make the journey that millions made before them. They are symbols as much as livestock — proof that the old ways can still work, that the knowledge has not been entirely lost.

The shepherds who guide them are the last links to a system that shaped Spain for half a millennium. They know the routes, the watering points, the places to shelter. They know how to move a thousand sheep across a landscape that has changed around them but not entirely forgotten them.

The roads are still there. The knowledge is still there. The question is whether anyone will walk them when the current shepherds are gone.

Some traditions die because they stop working. The cañadas still work — for the sheep, for the land, for the ecology that evolved with grazing. They die, if they die, because no one chooses to continue them. Because the walking is hard and the money is poor and the young people have other options.

The wool road waits. It has waited for centuries. It will wait a little longer, to see if anyone comes.