Alba de Tormes

Alba de Tormes has been settled since the Iron Age, when the Vaccaean people built a large hill fort here called Alvia. The Romans came next, then the Moors, and in the medieval period the kings of León repopulated the town and made it the seat of a council — the Concejo de Alba — that governed the surrounding villages. The town's position controlling a crossing of the Río Tormes gave it real strategic weight. In 1140 King Alfonso VII of León granted it its own fuero, a local law charter. That same strategic value made it a target: in 1196 Castilian forces attacked and sacked the town, after which King Alfonso IX of León resettled it and reconfirmed its legal rights.

For much of the medieval period Alba was a royal lordship under the Leonese crown. After the kingdoms of León and Castile merged, it passed through several noble hands before King Juan II gave it to Bishop Gutierre Álvarez de Toledo in 1429, linking the town's fate to the powerful House of Alba. The lordship was raised to a county in 1439 and then to a duchy in 1472, when King Enrique IV granted the title to García Álvarez de Toledo, who became the first Duke of Alba.

In 1571 St Teresa of Jesus founded her eighth Carmelite convent here. She died in it on 4 October 1582 and was buried there. The convent became a major pilgrimage site.

The town also saw military action during the Peninsular War. In 1812, in one of that conflict's notable engagements, French forces defeated Wellington's army, took the town, and left it badly damaged by cannon fire.

When Spain's current provincial boundaries were drawn in 1833, Alba de Tormes was placed in the province of Salamanca, within the Leonese region, and served as the head of its own judicial district until that was eventually absorbed into Salamanca.

The Convent of the Annunciation — home to the Discalced Carmelite nuns — is the town's main draw. St Teresa of Jesus founded it in 1571, the eighth of the sixteen convents she established between 1562 and 1582 as part of her reform of the Carmelite order. The founding was made possible by Francisco Vázquez, a receiver at the University of Salamanca, and his wife Teresa de Laíz. Teresa's own sister, Juana de Ahumada, and her husband Juan de Ovalle, who lived in the town, helped broker the arrangement. Teresa herself records the foundation day as the feast of the Conversion of St Paul, 1571.

The church was built in two distinct phases. The original section, constructed between 1571 and 1582, runs from the entrance to what is now the pulpit and includes the nave and an earlier chancel. The chancel is square in plan, covered by a ribbed vault with decorative keystones, and is attributed to the architect Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón. After Teresa's death, a baroque expansion between 1670 and 1680 added a sacristy, transept, dome, and new presbytery. This enlargement was funded with the help of King Philip IV and his wife Maria of Austria, which is why the addition is known as the Royal Work. The designer was the Carmelite friar Juan de San José.

Teresa's tomb became the engine driving all of these changes. After her canonisation in 1622, the original small church could no longer cope with the number of pilgrims, and the east wall was broken through to create the larger space that exists today. In the high altar retable — itself regarded as one of the most unusual examples of Spanish retable-making — her incorrupt body is displayed above the tabernacle. Her arm and heart are kept separately and can be seen together from the upper chamber behind the retable.