Lucena

Lucena's recorded past reaches back to Roman times, when the final battle between Julius Caesar and the Pompeians, the Battle of Munda, took place near the city. Its most distinctive period, however, came under early Islamic rule, when Lucena functioned as the principal centre of Jewish life in al-Andalus. For several centuries it was inhabited exclusively by Jews, and it housed a significant Jewish university whose scholars later travelled to Toledo to help found the famous School of Translators.

The old Jewish quarter, the Judería, survives in the form of narrow streets around the site of the former synagogue, and a Jewish necropolis was uncovered there in 2006. In 1126, the Aragonese king Alfonso I campaigned through Andalucía and defeated a Moorish force at nearby Anzur, taking many Mozarab Christians back north with him. Those who stayed faced reprisals.

In 1148 the Almohads invaded and destroyed the Jewish city after its inhabitants refused to convert to Islam; the survivors headed north to Toledo, where Jewish intellectual life continued to flourish. Fernando III took Lucena for Castile in 1240. Control passed through several noble hands before Boabdil, the last emir of Granada, was captured at the Battle of Lucena in 1483 and held prisoner in the castle's Torre del Moral.

With the fall of Granada in 1492 and the simultaneous expulsion of the Jews, Lucena's frontier role ended. Philip III granted the city its formal title in 1618, and it grew into one of Andalucía's more important towns during the following century. It backed the Bourbon claimant in the War of Succession, contributing militias and money toward the effort to recover Gibraltar, and Philip V rewarded it in 1712 with the honorific titles of Muy Noble and Muy Leal.

Through the early modern period the city was under the lordship of the Marquises of Comares, later linked to the Duchy of Medinaceli. Prolonged legal action by the townspeople eventually succeeded in 1767 in returning jurisdiction to the Crown. Lucena also played a notable part in resistance to Napoleon during the Peninsular War.

The most significant monument is the Castillo del Moral, a National Historic Monument standing beside the Paseo del Coso, the old open ground that once lay outside the city walls. Its oldest section is thought to date from the Jewish period, and the building has a square plan with corner towers. The octagonal Torre del Moral retains its baroque roofing, while the Torre del Homenaje was the cell where Boabdil, Granada's last emir, was held after his capture at the hands of the local magistrate Martín Hurtado.

Once Lucena ceased to be a frontier town, the castle became the residence of its lords, who were also Marquises of Comares and later Dukes of Cardona and Medinaceli. It now houses the city's Archaeological and Ethnological Museum. The Jewish necropolis discovered in 2006 is another tangible remnant of that earlier era, as is the layout of the Judería itself.

Among the baroque palaces, the Palacio de los Condes de Santa Ana on Calle San Pedro was built roughly between 1730 and 1750 for the Mora Saavedra family. Two masters of Lucena's baroque tradition, Francisco José Guerrero and Pedro de Mena Gutiérrez, worked on it. Notable features include the main façade and two interior courtyards, one of them colonnaded.

It has been restored and now serves as an exhibition and tourism space. The Palacio de los Condes de Hust, also in the heart of the Judería on Calle Flores de Negrón, is a palace distinguished by its three-bodied doorway. It was long associated with the Soto Flores family before passing to the Álvarez de Sotomayor line in the late eighteenth century, and today it serves as the municipal library.

The Palacio Erisana houses the city theatre and a drama school.