Trujillo

People have lived on this granite outcrop since prehistoric times, arrowheads, axes, and rock paintings survive from those earliest inhabitants. The underlying granite supplied both building stone and groundwater, two things that made permanent settlement practical. Romans knew the place as Turgalium, a stipendiary prefecture of the Lusitanian capital Augusta Emerita, sitting on the road that connected it to Caesaraugusta.

The medieval centuries were a long tug of war. Trujillo passed between Christian and Muslim control repeatedly: absorbed into the Kingdom of León, lost to the Almohads in 1196, and not definitively reconquered until 1233, when forces of the military orders of Alcántara, Santiago, and the Temple, led by the Mozarab Fernán Ruiz Altamirano, took the town after months of siege. Legend holds that the Virgin of Victory appeared to the Christian soldiers at the Arco del Triunfo before the final assault.

After the reconquest, Alfonso X granted the town its own charter in 1256, giving it jurisdiction over a wide territory bounded by Plasencia, Cáceres, and Medellín. By 1485 that territory included 22 villages, though some, among them the lands around the monastery of Guadalupe, had already separated from Trujillo's authority.

Trujillo's urban centre has carried a cultural heritage designation since 1962, and six individual monuments hold their own listed status: the castle, the church of Santa María la Mayor, the Palacio de la Cadena, the Palacio de la Conquista, the Palacio de Juan Pizarro Orellana, and the Palacio de San Carlos. The bullring and the Palacio de Chaves el Viejo are candidates for the same designation. Since 2024 the town has been a member of the Asociación Los Pueblos Más Bonitos de España, a title it previously held from 2016 to 2020.

The rectangular, porticoed Plaza Mayor is the town's most recognisable space. It holds the famous equestrian statue of Francisco Pizarro and is now lined with bars, restaurants, and the tourist information office. The church of Santa María la Mayor, the most significant of three parish churches, was built over a late Romanesque structure whose eastern tower still stands. San Martín de Tours on the Plaza Mayor dates from a later rebuilding after destruction in the Castilian War of Succession.

The castle sits at the top of the hill, built largely during the period of Muslim rule and visible for many kilometres across the surrounding plateau. On a less positive note, two buildings appear on the Hispania Nostra red list of endangered monuments: the Ermita de Santa Ana, damaged by late-night gatherings, and the plateresque rectory house of Santa María, which has become a rubbish dump.

Trujillo sits on a granite hill, its profile a mix of towers, walls, palaces and boulders, with the castle, built largely under Muslim rule, at the summit and visible for many kilometres across the plateau. The heart of the town is the porticoed, rectangular Plaza Mayor, presided over by the equestrian statue of Francisco Pizarro.

Trujillo's great century was the sixteenth, when Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana left for the Americas and families returning from there built houses, chapels and palaces. Among them are the palaces of the Marqués de la Conquista and the Duques de San Carlos, and the church of Santa María la Mayor is the most important of the town's three parish churches. The surrounding plains and dehesas are rich in birds such as the black stork, black vulture and Spanish imperial eagle, and the Plaza Mayor hosts the Feria Internacional del Queso.

Trujillo joined Los Pueblos Más Bonitos de España in 2024. The label is awarded by a private association, not the state: a village applies and is audited against around 40 criteria, from how its historic buildings are conserved to the upkeep of its streets, and members are reviewed and can lose it. Trujillo is one of 9 members in Extremadura, out of 126 in Spain. See all heritage towns in Extremadura.