Fregenal de la Sierra

The land around Fregenal de la Sierra has been occupied since the Chalcolithic period. The Ardila river valley that forms the town's natural boundary contains a group of standing stones, La Pepina, La Palanca del Moro and Los Tres Términos, all declared protected cultural monuments in March 2020. The town's origins lie close to the present urban centre, where the ruins of the Celtic hillfort of Nertobriga (also written Nerkobrika) are still being excavated.

Founded in the Second Iron Age within the region known as Baeturia Céltica, it was considered the capital of the Baeturian Celts. The Greek historian Polybius records its storming in 152 BC by the Roman praetor Marcus. After the Roman conquest the Celtic oppidum gave way to a Roman city, Nertobriga Concordia Iulia, which later received full municipal status.

It fell within the province of Hispania Ulterior for the first two centuries BC, then passed to Baetica, within which it remained for more than seven centuries until the beginning of the Moorish period. Christianity brought further importance: the city became an episcopal seat. By tradition its first bishops were Saints Teopompo and Eutropius.

Teopompo was martyred under Diocletian after baptising a magician. Eutropius, bishop in the fifth century, opposed the Avitist heresy and corresponded with both Augustine of Hippo and Jerome; he died on 17 February 420. Evidence of a Visigothic past includes the remains of what may have been a watchtower and a significant Muslim necropolis, suggesting the site was taken by force at the arrival of Islam.

The castle was later known as the Castillo de Valera before Alfonso X granted it to the Knights Templar. East of the town, the monastery of San Miguel de los Fresnos preserves a Visigothic-tradition apse. Tradition holds it was founded by Saints Honorius and Exuperantius, the latter a Benedictine monk of Italian origin born around 490 AD, who came to Nertobriga around 572 after earlier founding monasteries in Pamplona.

Fregenal de la Sierra's historic centre was declared a protected cultural ensemble in 1991 and is considered one of the most significant in the southern part of the province of Badajoz. The Templar Castle is the town's centrepiece. Probably built by the Knights Templar, recent discoveries of Roman, Visigothic and Moorish remains suggest it stands on the site of an earlier fortification.

Unusually, the castle walls enclose both a bullring, financed by the Brotherhood of the Virgen de los Remedios and later rebuilt when the town council granted ownership of 50 boxes to local residents, and a covered market, which belongs to the municipal authority. Built against the castle is the church of Santa María, later enlarged, which retains a major altarpiece inside, along with the parish house dating from the first half of the same period. The church of Santa Ana, in the neighbourhood of the same name, is the largest and most ornate in the town.

Built in the sixteenth century with later remodelling, it holds a major retablo attributed by recent scholarship to the carver Antonio de Auñón, who worked on it in the 1570s. Those same studies link its patronage to a group of converso families who had grown prosperous through leather and craft trades. The church also contains a Renaissance-style chapel with a tabernacle of around 150 kilograms of hallmarked silver, gilded in fine gold and set with enamel, pearls and precious stones, paid for by the townspeople.

The statesman Juan Bravo Murillo, a notable son of the city, is buried in one of the church's chapels alongside his parents. Santa Catalina church, also medieval in origin, surprises visitors with a plain façade concealing a Mudéjar timber ceiling and two sculptures, a Virgin and Child and a Pietà, attributed to Mercadante de Bretaña and among the oldest works of sacred art in lower Extremadura. Other monuments include the Convent of San Francisco, the Convent of the Augustinian Mothers, and the former Jesuit college and convent, the latter two funded by Alonso de Paz.

The neighbourhood around Santa Ana is also lined with aristocratic town houses: the Palace of the Counts of Torrepilares, the Casa de los Peche with its neo-Nasrid courtyard, and the palaces of the Marquises of Riocabado and Ferrera. Two historic fountains, the Fontanilla, topped by a figure of the Virgen de la Guía, and the Fuente de María Miguel, which has its own legend of impossible love, add further texture to the streets. Six kilometres from town stands the sanctuary of Nuestra Señora Santa María.