Guadalupe

According to legend, the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe was carved in Palestine, venerated in temples in Achaia and Byzantium, and eventually given by Pope Gregory the Great to Archbishop Leandro of Seville, who placed it in a shrine outside the city. When Muslim forces invaded in 711, local Christians hid the statue in a box beside the Guadalupe river, in the Villuercas hill country at the foot of the Sierra de Altamira. The image dates from the medieval period, and a hermitage was built to house it; the first settlers gathered around that hermitage, and the town took its name from the river where the statue had been hidden.

King Alfonso XI granted lands to these settlers in 1340, and by 1347 the place was already recorded under the name Puebla de Santa María de Guadalupe. In 1349 the king gave the sanctuary's prior the title Lord of the Town, a status that lasted until 1820, when the first municipal council was formed. The monastery was entrusted to the Hieronymite Order in 1389 and remained under their care until 1835, after which it stood largely abandoned until the Franciscans took over in 1908.

In 1833 the town was incorporated into the province of Cáceres.

The Real Monasterio de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe dominates the town. Run by the Hieronymite Order from 1389 to 1835, it combines Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and strongly Mudéjar elements within a fortress enclosure, and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1993. The Gothic church has three naves with ribbed vaulting; its main altarpiece, designed by Juan Gómez de Mora, was gilded and painted by Giraldo de Merlo and Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli, son of El Greco, and frames large canvases by Vicente Carducho and Eugenio Caxés. The Virgin's Camarín contains paintings by Luca Giordano. The two-storey Mudéjar cloister has a small Gothic-Mudéjar brick temple at its centre, covered in Manises tiles. The Chapter House holds important Gothic frescoes; the Gothic cloister, by Covarrubias, served as pharmacy and hospital; and the sacristy and Chapel of St Jerome contain the famous Zurbarán paintings. The monastery's museums hold works by Juan de Flandes, Zurbarán, Goya, El Greco, Pedro de Mena and others, alongside embroidered altar frontals and illuminated choir books from the 15th to 18th centuries.

Beyond the monastery, the town retains a network of medieval pilgrims' hospitals and hospices, of which several survive: the Monks' Infirmary, the Hospital of San Juan Bautista (now part of the Parador), the Nuevo, Pasión and San Sebastián hospitals. The Hospital de San Juan was the first place in Spain where surgery and dissection were carried out with papal authority, granted by Pope Eugene IV in 1442. The former Grammar College, a Mudéjar work by Antón Egas with a fine cloister, carved ceilings and doorways, became the Parador Nacional de Zurbarán in 1966. The Baroque Iglesia Nueva, built 1730–1735 at the expense of the Duke of Veragua, a descendant of Christopher Columbus, has three naves, a crossing and a dome. Five of the original town gates survive — San Pedro, Sevilla and Chorro Gordo from the inner wall, and Eras and Tinte from the outer. The Belén Artesanal de Norberto, a nativity scene of more than 400 hand-fired clay figures created by the Barba González family, is open for free visits year-round.