Sharpe's Company by Bernard Cornwell. The Peninsular War novel set during the brutal 1812 British siege of Badajoz, when Wellington's forces took the city after weeks of trench warfare and then sacked it for three days. The fictional Richard Sharpe is the lens, but the historical detail of the fortifications — many of them still standing — is exact.
As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee. Lee crossed into Spain at the Portuguese border just south of here in 1935, walked through Extremadura on his way to Andalusia, and was eventually pulled out by the Royal Navy as the Spanish Civil War began. His descriptions of Extremaduran poverty, generosity and landscape are a counterweight to the tourist gloss.
The Conquistadors by Hammond Innes. Many of the most ruthless conquistadors — Pizarro, Cortés, Balboa, De Soto — were Extremadurans, born in the harsh dehesa villages around Badajoz and Trujillo. Innes's narrative history connects the poverty of 16th-century Extremadura to the silver of Potosí and the destruction of the Aztec and Inca empires.
The Carolingian Chronicles (Annales regni Francorum). For the historically minded, the Frankish chronicles of the early 9th century record the activities of Ibn Marwan, the Galician-Muslim rebel who founded Badajoz around 875 — one of the few places in Spain that can name its precise founder and date.