Arrieros, Sierra de Aracena

Chef Luismi López and his wife, Adela Ortiz, are seated at their local café carved out of a former bullring. Above it towers the village church, and downhill stretches a web of cobbled streets and whitewashed houses. “Linares only has about 300 inhabitants,” Luismi points out. “So our clients come from nearby towns like Aracena and Alájar. They dress up to come for dinner—for them it’s an occasion.”

Arrieros is a cool, rustic-chic restaurant that flows outside onto a sunny, flowery terrace. Here, neighbors’ chitchat and church bells vie with a cacophony of hundreds of birds nurtured by the surrounding nature reserve that stretches to the Portuguese border. The verdant woodlands are also famously home to Iberian pigs, which end up as superlative solomillo or jamón ibérico, so it is no surprise that Luismi loves cooking with pork.