Avila city guide

The ancient Roman ‘Avela’, ringed with walls in the Middle Ages, was built like a cliff-top fortress, on a hill overlooking the river Adaja. The history of the town revolves around wars and acts of heroism; religion and a tendency towards mysticism also played an important role. The town was originally an Iberian-Celtic settlement, which, according to Ptolemy, lay at the eastern periphery of Lusitania and bore the name of “Obila’. Numerous sculptures depicting bulls and boars can be seen in some of the streets and palaces and these testify to the presence of an ancient Iberian civilization.

The 1C AD saw the arrival of Bishop San Segundo, one of the seven apostolic emissaries, who converted the town to Christianity. In the heyday of the Romanesque, during the Reconquista’ Count Raymond of Burgundy seized the town from the Moors. Thereafter many noblemen from Burgos, León, Asturias, and Galicia settled here, giving Avila the sobriquet ‘de los Caballeros’ (Ávila of the Noblemen). It became the residence of several Castilian kings and the seat of the ‘Juntas’. St. Theresa, the great mystic and reformer of the Carmelite Order, was born here in 1515.