NEW YORK, NY.- A day in Brihuega during the lavender bloom requires only one set plan: Get to the fields by sunset, to view an unexpected, lush swath of purple as far as the eye can see, with the orange glow of the Spanish sun directly behind it.

Brihuega, a small medieval town in the roughly 4,700-square-mile province of Guadalajara and about an hour’s drive from Madrid, is surrounded by farmland, villages and nature preserves of brown and soft-green hues. But each year in summer, on fields where some of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish Civil War were once fought, those colors change with the bloom of a thousand hectares of lavender, the equivalent of about 2,500 acres or 3,000 American football fields.

In the past decade, the lavender harvest has revitalized Brihuega, drawing welcomed visitors — and their euros — with natural beauty rivaling vacation favorites like Provence in France.

“Not to say anything bad about the French, but the Spanish, we’re maybe more — dicharacheros,” said Ángel Corral Manzano, the town’s major lavender farmer, using a difficult-to-translate Spanish term that means outgoing and talkative. “We’re very eager, excited to welcome you.”

Blooming Industry

I first learned about Brihuega while studying in the nearby university town of Alcalá de Henares. Craving manchego cheese and jamón Ibérico one afternoon, I stumbled into Vinoteca Esencias del Gourmet, a wine bar. While I feasted on croquetas and cheeses and drank a spicy syrah, the bar owner, Javier Hernandez, told me about his hometown, Brihuega.

For generations, his family was the town churreros, the churro-makers. But like many young people in small Spanish villages, Hernandez left Brihuega.

“I couldn’t see a future,” he said. He wasn’t alone.

“Brihuega was starting to lose its population,” Luís Viejo Esteban, Brihuega’s current mayor, told me later in an email. “That was the trend before we started developing our socioeconomic model, principally on tourism.”

Now, Brihuega is growing, thanks to its lavender-centered tourism. Last July, during peak bloom, more than 120,000 tourists visited, Viejo said. Lavender annually generates between 4 million to 6.5 million euros, roughly $4.3 million to $7 million, according to a study from the University of Alcalá de Henares and Fadeta, a local rural development group.

“If you told me 10 years ago that, thanks to lavender, there would be so much tourism, that so many shops would open, so many restaurants, I wouldn’t believe you,” Corral said. “We’re just farmers. We live off the land and live for the land.”

Corral and his two brothers started planting lavender in earnest in 2007 after his oldest brother, Andrés, visited Provence and noticed the French region had similar terrain to his home.

Guadalajara already had espliego, a wild, mountain plant in the lavender family that is difficult to cultivate. But the Corral brothers started to grow French lavender, which is used in perfumes and high-end applications, and lavandin, a hybrid plant of espliego and lavender that can be used for commercial products, like cleaners.

“We had planted grains — wheat and barley — but we knew it would be good to diversify,” Corral said. Tourism was never in their minds. They started slowly, planting a few fields of lavender and lavandin at a time. But that grew as the brothers recognized a hectare of lavender — about two and a half acres — could make them a bit more money than a hectare of wheat. They later brought in Emilio Valeros, a Spanish perfumer, and the longtime “nose” for Loewe Perfumes, as a partner in their distillery to transform their crops into oil.

In 2013, the family hosted a sunset concert in their lavender fields, inviting 40 friends to drink beer and lavender gin and tonics. The event’s success evolved into the popular lavender festival the town hosts each July.

A Sunset View

During my mid-July visit, I was accompanied by Hernandez. We started at a bar, Los Guerrilleros, drinking ice-cold beer and eating fresh, shatteringly crisp guerrilleros, the bar’s namesake specialty of tempura-battered shrimp and anchovies. We then roamed the pedestrian-only streets decorated with lavender streamers and hanging purple umbrellas, stopping by the old washing fountains, the bull ring, the cathedral; we picked up lavender-laced cookies from the local bakery and shopped for gifts in the boutiques. Moorish walls surround the town and the Piedra Bermeja Castle, the roof of which offers picturesque views of the Tajuña River below, where, Hernandez said, the town’s kids learn to swim.

Last fall, Guadalajara’s first five-star hotel, Castilla Termal Brihuega, opened in a converted royal textile mill.

“Brihuega is the ideal site for the opening of Castilla Termal Brihuega for many reasons,” said the hotel’s chief executive, Roberto García, citing the region’s heritage, beauty and proximity to Madrid. The mill’s 19th-century gardens were deemed a cultural heritage site by the Spanish government.

As the sun began to set on my July afternoon visit, we drove out of town to view the lavender fields. We stopped at a scenic lookout and took in the vast fields of lavender on either side: The work of the Hermanos Corral was magnificent.

Family Recipes, Farther Afield

The region’s charm and similarities to Provence do not end in Brihuega’s lavender fields. Guadalajara province boasts a bounty of appealing gastronomy, viticulture, hiking trails and bike routes, and charming stone villages.

The town of Cogolludo, a 45-minute drive north of Brihuega, is home to the Renaissance-style castle, Castillo de Cogolludo, but just outside the town is a winery with a renaissance of its own. La Finca Río Negro is a family-owned estate in the foothills of the Central System mountains, where flat farmland transforms into rocky hills with tall pines. Just on the other side of the mountains from Spain’s prominent Ribera del Duero wine region, this area once had a winemaking culture of its own.

“This town was important enough to have a palace and dukes; it made a living from viticulture,” said Fernando Fuentes, the Finca’s manager. “But then it was very poor during the postwar period. As people left for the cities, the vineyards were abandoned little by little.”

When Finca Río Negro opened in Cogolludo, there were no other vineyards in the region. “Twenty years ago, we weren’t seen as pioneers, we were just seen as crazy,” Fuentes said. Today, they make award-winning wines and have rediscovered and cultivated a variety of grapes endemic to the region, Tinto Fragoso. It has red fruit flavors with unexpected floral notes and spice from the French oak in which it’s aged.

I also visited Hiendelaencina — a town of under 150, once the site of a silver mine — for the lunch at Mesón Sabory. The decades-old restaurant has been serving locally grown and raised food in a home built in the 1870s. I wasn’t given a menu because they only serve what’s fresh.

My meal started with Patatas bravas: Chunks of crispy potatoes, fluffy inside, with a spicy bravas sauce, a recipe from the mother of Julián Illana, one of the owners. A salad of tomato and sweet onions came next and a plate of liver and heart, cooked with onions. There were more courses — chorizo and torreznos, fried pork belly — then a big black clay pot arrived with two roasted goat legs inside. I tore the tender meat off the bone, and used crusty bread to make little boats, or hacer barquitos, to sop up the juices.

“It’s just salt and water, nothing else,” said Illana. The recipes haven’t changed in 50 years. The suckling goats come from their family farm, and the clay ovens used for roasting are almost a century old. Thyme and rockrose are added to the flame and impress their flavor onto the goat that had roamed this land, eating these aromatics.

“The days you want to eat simple, honest, traditional food — that’s a good day to come to us,” Illana said.

After lunch, I drove west to Valverde de los Arroyos, one of the stops along the Route of Black Villages in Guadalajara, a series of villages built in slate. In Valverde, quartz specks make the stone shine gold in the sun, creating an otherworldly glint, like dragon scales. It’s also a starting point for several hikes in the Tajo Alto Nature Reserve. I opted for a short one, an hour up to the Despeñalagua waterfalls that come streaming down from the cliffs above.

Back in Alcalá de Henares, I asked Hernandez how he felt about the renaissance of his hometown.

“I’m so proud. There was a long history of the village, and now there are many more stories to be told,” Hernandez said. “I didn’t always see its future, but now I do, thanks to tourism, thanks to the lavender.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.