Museo del Queso

No country seems to like food museums as much as Spain. Wine, cheese, honey, chocolate: you name it, there’s a museum for it. Many exhibitions explore the origins and variations of the long-eaten foods that make the country a culinary destination. One museum in Extremadura, however, is dedicated to one cheese, and one cheese only.

The Museo del Queso in the village of Casar de Cáceres celebrates the centuries-old regional specialty Torta del Casar. Long-ago shepherds, nudging herds of sheep down roads used since Roman times, realized that the cardo, a purple-flowered thistle lining the paths, could coagulate their sheep’s milk into cheese. The thistle, known as cardoon in English, is a relative of the artichoke and gives the slowly-aged cheese its subtle bitter flavor. With an unusually soft, semiliquid center, the pressed cylinder of cheese sags in the middle. 

The simple museum, housed in a typical local abode, showcases the production of the cheese as well as the lifestyles of the mere eight families who today produce Torta del Casar. So sacred is the cheese-making process that in 1999, the Extremadura government created the Denominación de Origen del Casar, a regulatory body charged solely with certifying regional Torta and policing imitation cheeses. This body also ensures that the cheese is only made from the milk of Merino and Entrefina sheep⁠—notoriously ungenerous milk-producers. It takes 20 of these sheep to yield 2.2 pounds of cheese. It’s perhaps no surprise that the museum withholds free samples.