Osuna

Osuna's origins go back roughly three thousand years, when the Turdetani people occupied the site known as Urso. In 44 BC, Mark Antony refounded it as a Roman citizen colony under the official name Colonia Genetiva Iulia, fulfilling an earlier plan of Julius Caesar. The founding law of that colony — an incomplete bronze inscription known as the Lex Ursonensis — survives and is held in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid.

By early medieval times the name had shifted toward Ursona, and the town later passed through Vandal, Suebian, and Visigothic destruction before recovering under Almoravid and Almohad rule, when it was called Uxuna and a fortress was built. Castilian forces under Fernando III took it in 1239, and in 1264 it passed to the Order of Calatrava, which held it as a strategic buffer against the Nasrid kingdom of Granada. The Calatrava knights eventually ceded Osuna to Pedro Téllez de Girón, whose descendants became Dukes of Osuna under Philip II.

The town's greatest period came under Juan Téllez Girón, the fourth Count of Ureña, born in Osuna around 1494, who over thirty years commissioned thirteen churches and convents, a hospital, a university, a collegiate church, and a ducal tomb — making him the most significant architectural patron of his era in the region.

The Collegiate Church was founded in 1535 by Juan Téllez Girón after he obtained a papal bull elevating the existing parish. Built from locally quarried stone, its exterior is severe and plain, with four square buttresses framing the main façade. Three doorways are open; two others have been blocked since the 18th century. One entrance leads directly off the Cuesta facing the Monastery of the Incarnation. Inside, a small courtyard gives access to the Pantheon of the Dukes of Osuna, built between 1544 and 1555 and considered one of the finest Renaissance spaces in Spain. Its two stone cloisters carry arched arcades decorated with grotesques, Ionic pilasters in the Plateresque style, and 17th-century paintings centred on the Last Supper. Beyond lies a sacristy with Plateresque ornament and a polychrome green-and-gold coffered ceiling, leading to the Chapel of the Virgin of la Granada, attributed to Guillén Ferrant.

The old University is a rectangular building arranged around a square courtyard, its roofline marked by four corner towers capped with glazed ceramic spires. The entrance vestibule retains a fine two-order timber ceiling with marquetry decoration. Much of the interior has been modernised, but the southeastern side preserves its original layout: entrance hall, chapel, the Sala de la Girona, central courtyard, staircase, and library. Declared a protected monument by the Junta de Andalucía in 2004, the building now operates as a university college affiliated with the University of Seville.