La Vera pepper-drying secadero

A pepper dryer built into the landscape

A secadero is a fixed agricultural building for drying peppers before they are milled into paprika. This account focuses on the traditional form associated with Pimentón de la Vera in northern Cáceres, Extremadura. The protected geographical area is wider than La Vera alone: the current specification lists municipalities in La Vera, Campo Arañuelo, Valle del Ambroz and Valle del Alagón. The Regulatory Council says these dryers were historically built on the plots where peppers grew, with farmers carrying out this first processing stage before dried peppers went to mills.

The name can refer to a family of structures rather than one surviving, dated building. The Council describes dimensions as variable; many examples are square or rectangular and roughly five metres high. It also allows other dimensions, materials and improved technologies when the final product's quality is unaffected. This page therefore presents the documented traditional arrangement, not a universal blueprint or a measured reconstruction.

Two levels and a rising current

In the traditional layout described by the DOP specification, the lower level contains a hearth burning holm oak and/or oak. The pepper chamber sits above it. Its floor is a wooden grate, allowing hot air and combustion gases to rise through the fruit by convection. Ceramic roof tiles cover the building, with an open or loose-laid roof arrangement allowing the gases to escape. This direct smoke path is the defining feature of the protected product: the smoke aroma comes from the drying method itself.

The Council describes brick and Arabic ceramic roof tiles as common materials, but it explicitly permits variation. A Commons photograph on this page shows a stone-built pepper dryer in Candeleda, Ávila, a neighboring regional example. It is not identified as a La Vera specimen, and the illustration is a schematic of the documented two-level form rather than a measured interior of that photographed building.

Harvest, drying and the protected product

The current specification defines Pimentón de la Vera as ground peppers that are fully red, mature, healthy and clean, from eligible varieties, and dried with holm-oak and/or oak wood within the protected area. It describes a drying period of 10 to 15 days and regular turning of the peppers for more even drying. Its stated moisture transition and process details belong to the regulated commercial product description; they are not a household recipe or a safe operating standard for an improvised dryer.

The Regulatory Council's history links the vertical dryer to autumn rains that coincide with harvest, and attributes its development to farmers in the seventeenth century. That is the Council's account of the tradition, not an independently confirmed date for any surviving structure. The DOP specification is the stronger source for the present protected process and geographic boundaries; the council history supplies the attributed origin story.

What this record does not establish

No single secadero is identified here as the original or definitive example. The image's Candeleda building is explicitly a neighboring example, not proof of a La Vera site's exact materials or internal layout. The sources also do not provide a plan for a particular building, safe domestic fire controls, ventilation settings, construction dimensions for a named site or instructions for processing peppers at home. The page describes a traditional regional structure and how it relates to the protected commercial product.