lliterate bastard Francisco Pizarro was born in a backstreet of Trujillo in the Extremadura region of southwest Spain. He had countless half-brothers and sisters, his father favouring a flexible attitude to marital fidelity. Francisco was, though, the only one to make it across town – onto a pedestal in the Plaza Mayor. In his middle years, you see, he left Trujillo and conquered Peru. Hence the progression from penury to statuary.Some 475 years later, I’m sitting at a bar terrace in the square trying to tune out my Spanish neighbours’ conversation to focus on the scene. When evening descends over the town, it’s striking to behold, with the lichened cathedral silhouetted Gothically against the red sky. Storks flap heavily back to spiky nests atop the buildings all around the square, demonstrating that they haven’t quite mastered the art of landing.

Old Francisco is unmoved (obviously; he’s a statue), and in classic, 16th-century Spanish military mode – astride a horse and bearded, with a sharp helmet and country-conquering aspect. Even so, as I sip Rioja and the sky darkens to deep blue, the air gusty, I have to remind myself that this particular illiterate bastard saw off the Inca empire, equipped only with greed, God and the merest handful of fellow soldiers: not bad for a small-town boy. Of course, Peruvian Indians have a rather different take on the conquistador – but they didn’t put up the statue.

Next morning, I snake up through magnificent stone streets to the Moorish castle which oversees Trujillo. The views are arresting. Beyond the town, scorched table-land rolls away enormously, stopping only for tough mountains and, to the west, Portugal. Here was the essence of Extremadura. Dramatic and unyielding. This has been the toughest, emptiest, poorest swathe of Spain pretty much since the Romans. For the outsider, the scale is mesmerising. This is obviously where the Good Lord put all Europe’s surplus space. Farmsteads float upon the vastness and might, it seems, have sailed off somewhere quite different by tomorrow.

Great plantations of holm oaks provide an infinity of acorns for pigs – which, in turn, provide some of Spain’s finest ham. Extremaduran food is surprisingly brilliant – and unsurprisingly meat-based. Under arcades in splendid town squares you may eat like a prince, and pay like a pauper.

Life was never easy here, though. And when, in the early 16th century, rumours of eye-watering wealth came blowing across from the New World, Extremadurans were a lot sharper than other Spaniards. They’d little to lose. They sailed out, got stuck in, and, if countries like Mexico, Honduras, Peru, Panama, Bolivia and Chile now speak Spanish, it’s largely due to impoverished lads from this Euro-backwater, subsequently billed as the Land of Conquistadors.

Justifiably so. You bump into conquerors all over the place. Coming down from Trujillo castle, I passed the rather fancy house of Francisco de Orellana, one of many Extremadurans with Pizarro in Peru. He entered the jungle looking for cinnamon (then as valuable as gold), found none, but discovered the Amazon. Trujillo’s steep, sinuous streets are indeed riddled with town houses put up by booty-rich mercenaries lucky enough to get back alive. But Pizarro was Trujillo’s main man; the conquistador’s conquistador. A little museum up in the old family home tells the tale. Frankly, it’s an ambiguous one. Chaps like Pizarro were freebooters, acting on their own initiative, generally loathing one another and at loggerheads with the Spanish authorities.

They were also extraordinary. Pizarro toppled the Inca empire with fewer than

200 men. Earlier, the equally Extremaduran Hernán Cortés beat the Aztecs in Mexico with around 600. Cut-throat ruthlessness came into it, of course, but the key to

success lay in exploiting dissensions within the empires. Many non-Aztec Mexican Indians welcomed Cortés – and fought with him against their all-raping, all-plundering, all-human sacrificing Aztec masters. And you can imagine that, if you were next on the Inca chopping board, you’d have been damned glad to see Pizarro arrive.

Nor were the conquests all slaughter and plunder. The grandest palace on Trujillo’s Plaza Mayor was put up for the daughter Pizarro had with an Inca princess. Cortés built a similarly stately pile in nearby Cáceres for Montezuma’s daughter. The conquistadors’ story is, in short, slightly more nuanced than we’ve been lead to believe.

And Trujillo is a splendid place to start learning about them. At least, I thought so, since I had my friend Maïté to show me round. (She can be your friend, too; she’s a guide at the tourist office.) Maïté was bubbly and brilliant and, after we’d finished with the conquistadors, she escorted me through Roman, Moorish and Renaissance bits, all intact because nothing’s ever happened here to disturb them. ‘This is Spain for grown-ups,’ I said, sagely. Maïté laughed and took me for wine and cheese.

I didn’t want to leave, but left anyway, taking off across the battered plateau and feeling that, in these surroundings, I really should have been riding out behind Eli Wallach. Gradually, the landscape grew loftier and greener and I was driving up

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