Baza

The land around Baza has drawn people since the Chalcolithic and Bronze Ages, when copper deposits, fertile irrigated soils and naturally defensible terrain made it unusually attractive. Greek and Roman writers knew the wider region as Bastetania, and its principal settlement, Basti, stood just outside what is now Baza on the hill of Cerro Cepero. Under Roman imperial rule, mining expanded to include iron, gold, silver and lead.

The Moorish period brought sophisticated water management, irrigation channels, cisterns and watermills, that transformed the agricultural landscape. Baza was drawn into the Reconquista slowly. In 1324, Granada's king Ismaíl I seized the town back from Castile during the minority of Alfonso XI.

It was eventually incorporated into the Christian kingdom at the end of the War of Granada, with one notable condition: the existing Muslim population was not forced to leave. Wealthy Muslims who did depart left their land behind, creating large estates. The biggest grant went to Enrique Enríquez de Quiñones, an uncle of King Ferdinand the Catholic, who received over 1,350 hectares.

His associate Hernando de Santa Olalla was made lifetime councillor in 1507, founding a local oligarchic dynasty. After the Alpujarras revolt, resettlement was reorganised around smaller land parcels, producing a more mixed pattern of ownership, with smallholders on irrigated ground, communal municipal land, and large estates in the sierra. By the late eighteenth century, the 1787 Floridablanca census counted 7,740 inhabitants.

During the eighteenth century an Italian banker based in Madrid, Count Juan Evangelista Giraldeli, acquired more than 3,000 hectares in the area and bought the position of town councillor. Ecclesiastically, Baza fell under the Abbey, later Collegiate Church, of Nuestra Señora de la Encarnación, within the diocese of Guadix. By the start of the nineteenth century the town's population stood at nearly 13,000.

Baza's most striking monument is the Collegiate Church of Nuestra Señora Santa María de la Encarnación, now a co-cathedral of the diocese of Guadix-Baza. It was built on the site of the main mosque, begun in Gothic style in 1529, then largely destroyed by an earthquake in 1531. The damaged sections were rebuilt to a Renaissance design by Alonso de Covarrubias.

The interior has three aisles covered by ribbed vaulting, with an ambulatory. The square bell tower, reconstructed after a later earthquake, is made of brick and dates from subsequent centuries. Three kilometres from the modern town, Cerro Cepero is the site of Basti, one of the most important fortified Iberian cities in Spain, significant enough to give its name to the entire Bastetanian region.

In 1971, excavations here uncovered the Dama de Baza, a major example of Iberian funerary sculpture now held in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. The old alcazaba at the heart of the historic centre was once considered virtually impregnable. Only sections of its walls and towers survive, but they show three distinct building phases: early medieval, Nasrid, and later Christian.

Restoration is ongoing. The nearby Palacio de los Enríquez, commissioned in 1506 by Enrique Enríquez de Quiñones and his wife María de Luna, is an unusual example of an Italian-style country villa applied to a Granadan context, unique in the province. It retains elaborately decorated Mudéjar wooden ceilings.

After standing near-ruinous for years, the city council acquired it in 2017. The Church of Santiago, built over a mosque at the start of the sixteenth century, is considered the best example of Mudéjar church architecture in Baza, with three naves and a raised choir. Baza also has some of the oldest urban baths on the Iberian Peninsula: the Baños de la Judería, discovered beneath a house near the Puerta de Salomón in the late nineteenth century, declared a National Monument in 1975, restored, and opened to the public in 2008, winning the National Archaeology Prize.

Seven defensive towers and several castles, including Benzalema, positioned to watch the pass from the Kingdom of Jaén along the Guadiana Menor valley, are also listed as protected heritage sites.