Garrovillas de Alconétar

The area around Garrovillas de Alconétar has been inhabited since prehistory. Dolmens at Guadancil and Cerro Garrote, excavated by a local priest, yielded objects including an eye idol now held in the Museo de Cáceres and the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, some pieces had been shown at the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition beforehand. A bronze pistiliform sword, 67 cm long and dating to around 1200 BC, was found in 1931 on the bed of the Tagus near Alconétar; it survives in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional.

Before the Romans arrived, a pre-Roman hillfort stood at the confluence of the Tagus and the Almonte, possibly called Turmogum, home to a Lusitanian tribe. The Romans occupied it, renamed it Turmulus, and built a bridge, the Puente de Mantible, to carry the Via de la Plata across the Tagus. In 828 a Muslim leader named Mahamud, based at the enclave, allied with Berber rebels against Abd al-Rahman II.

He and his sister later fled and joined the Christian king Alfonso II of Asturias, a story that fed later legends. The Arabs subsequently built a tower to defend the bridge, giving the crossing the name Alconétara. In 1133 the Almoravid emir Tasufin ben Ali retook Alconétar.

Alfonso VIII handed the castle to the Knights Templar in 1167, who made it the head of a commandery. The village of Garro, as Garrovillas was then known, belonged to the jurisdiction of Alconétar until the Tagus flooded and destroyed that town; Alfonso X granted it the status of a villa and the surviving population merged into Garro, which then took the combined name Garrovillas de Alconétar. The Templars abandoned the castle around 1258 following disputes with the neighbouring orders of Alcántara and Santiago, and the castle reverted to the Crown.

Alfonso X granted the lordship to his son Fernando de la Cerda in 1268. By 1368 the Puente de Mantible was already in ruins. The lordship passed through several hands, eventually to Enrique de Guzmán, second Count of Niebla, by royal grant in 1434, and later to the counts of Alba de Liste.

One notable native son was Captain Alonso de Mendoza, who crossed to the New World and founded the city of La Paz, today the seat of Bolivia's government, on 20 October 1548. A street in the town has carried his name since the mid-twentieth century.

Garrovillas has one of the best-preserved old quarters in the province of Cáceres. Its historic core grew during a period of significant development between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and was further preserved by the rural depopulation of the twentieth century. The narrow streets of the northern old town are lined with vernacular two-storey houses, their facades whitewashed and some topped by large chimneys.

The centrepiece is the Plaza de la Constitución, the main square, a work of traditional architecture with Gothic and Mudéjar influence covering more than 4,000 square metres, regarded as one of the finest rural main squares in Spain. It is flanked by mostly two-storey buildings whose granite columns support arcaded porticos; above them rise galleries of tall windows with slender columns and semicircular arches. Some buildings date to the sixteenth century.

The square also holds the Palace of the Counts of Alba de Liste, former lords of the town, now restored as a hotel, and a corral de comedias theatre built between 1985 and 1991 in a historicist style inspired by the corral de comedias in Almagro. On Calle de las Seis Rejas stands the so-called Casa de los Templarios, a Renaissance building from the sixteenth century. In the eastern part of the town a traditional jurisdictional stone pillar survives, a simple cylinder topped by a pyramid.

The town has two late-Gothic parish churches. San Pedro, in the north, is the older of the two, combining Romanesque and Gothic elements; it is a three-nave granite ashlar building, the broad central nave being its most striking feature. Santa María de la Consolación, in the heart of the old town, is slightly later, dating from the early sixteenth century, and has a single nave in three bays.

It is known for its organ, already being restored in 1595 by Italian organ-builder Horacio Fabri; its construction technique places it in the height of the Renaissance, and it is considered one of the oldest surviving instruments of its kind, valued for its age rather than its size. Officially recognised heritage in Garrovillas includes the Puente de Alconétar and the Convento de San Antonio, along with the castle of Alconétar, the stone pillar, and several boundary crosses and heraldic shields covered by regional heritage law.