Medina Sidonia

The earliest signs of human occupation on the hill of Las Madres go back to the Late Atlantic Bronze Age, when inhabitants left behind hand-made pottery fragments and stone tools, and appear to have been connected to the Tartessian culture of southern Iberia. A popular tradition claims that Phoenician settlers from the city of Sidon founded the town and gave it their name. Historians treat this cautiously, it remains a hypothesis based largely on the similarity between the two place names, without solid supporting evidence.

By Roman times the settlement had grown into a properly planned urban centre covering roughly the same ground as the historic quarter today. The emperor Augustus granted it the status of a Roman colony with full civic rights. It went by several names, Asido, Caesarina, and the full form Asido Caesarina Augusta, and belonged to the province of Baetica, within the judicial district centred on Hispalis (modern Seville).

Under the Visigoths, the city, then called Asidona, became both a provincial capital and an episcopal seat of the Catholic Church, a suffragan diocese under the archbishopric of Seville. In 712 the Umayyad general Musa ibn Nusair took the city in the early stages of the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. It became the capital of the Muslim district known as the Cora of Sidonia, until a Norse raid sacked it.

Alfonso X reconquered the city on 22 September 1264, and it subsequently sat on the frontier facing the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada, a position reflected in medieval documents that refer to it with the suffix "de la Frontera." Several military orders, among them the Order of Santiago and the Order of Santa María, had a presence here during the Reconquista. In 1440 the town passed into the lordship of the Dukes of Medina Sidonia. Like much of rural Andalucía, it saw peasant uprisings in the nineteenth century.

Medina Sidonia holds an unusually dense concentration of monuments for a town of its size, spanning Roman engineering, medieval fortifications, and a cluster of churches and convents that filled the hilltop over several centuries. Underground, a Roman archaeological complex preserves sections of the ancient water supply system, conduits, drains, and sewers, along with stretches of Roman road and two Roman bridges, the Puente de la Hoya and the Puente de los Tres Ojos. Remains of a Roman castellum also survive on the castle hill.

Above ground, the medieval walls are still largely intact, pierced by three significant gateways: the Arco de la Pastora, the Arco de Belén, and the Puerta del Sol. The castle site layers three phases of occupation, Roman, Arab, and medieval, one on top of the other. A separate castle, the Castillo de Torrestrella, also stands within the municipality.

The Torre de Doña Blanca de Borbón is another surviving defensive structure. The town has six historic fountains: the Fuente Salada, Fuente Grande, Fuente del Comendador (also called Fuente Chica), Fuente de la Azocarrem, Fuente de los Naranjos, and Fuente de la Canaleja. Religious buildings are everywhere.

The Iglesia Mayor de Santa María la Coronada is the principal church. Others include the churches of La Victoria, Santiago, San Juan de Dios, and San Agustín, the last partially collapsed. Two convents remain active: San Cristóbal (locally known as the Monjas de abajo) and Jesús, María y José (the Monjas de arriba).

Among the hermitages, the Ermita de los Santos Mártires dates to the Visigothic period. Several others have disappeared entirely, while a few have been converted to other uses, one now houses the Municipal Historical Archive, another became the municipal theatre.