Trujillo

Overview

Trujillo is a granite hill town of about 8,600 people in the province of Cáceres, in eastern Extremadura, with a Moorish castle on top and a Plaza Mayor of Renaissance palaces below it. The fortress went up in the 9th century on the end of the walled enclosure, on an outcrop the locals call Cabeza del Zorro, and the town has been sliding downhill from it ever since.

You come for the split personality of the place. The upper town is walls, gates and lanes on a slope; the lower town is money from the Americas turned into stone. Francisco Pizarro was born here, and so was Francisco de Orellana, the first European to run the length of the Amazon. Pizarro sits in bronze on a horse in the middle of Plaza Mayor, a 6,500 kg piece by the American sculptor Charles Rumsey, unveiled in 1929 by his widow Mary Harriman.

The old town is small enough to cover on foot in an afternoon and steep enough that you will notice. Walking it costs nothing. The ticketed part, the castle, Casa-Museo Pizarro and a handful of small museums, runs on a single flat price set by the town hall, so there is no ticket strategy to work out beyond deciding how many doors you want to open.

The municipality itself is huge, 649.53 km² for those 8,600 people, mostly dehesa and river country running north to the Almonte. Storks breed on the old buildings, and lesser kestrels nest in the bull-ring and other spots in town, which is why you will see birdwatchers with scopes in the middle of a monumental old quarter.

History

The Romans knew the site as Turgalium and made it a prefecture of Emerita Augusta, modern Mérida, developing it to pull the surrounding population into their trade networks. After the Islamic conquest of 711 it became one of the main towns of the region under the Arabic name Targhālah, and the castle you climb to today dates from that period.

For most of the 12th century the town was a prize passed back and forth. Almoravid raiding parties set out from here against the land of Talavera; under Almohad rule, wars with Portugal, Castile and León meant possession kept changing hands, returning to Muslim control for the last time in 1195. Between 1188 and 1195 Trujillo was the headquarters of its own military order.

An army of the military orders and the Bishop of Plasencia, backed by Ferdinand III, finally took the town on 25 January 1232. The Christian troops came in through the western gate that has been called the Arco del Triunfo ever since, and local legend has the assault stalling until soldiers saw the Virgin appear between two towers of the wall.

Along with Plasencia, Cáceres and Coria, Trujillo was one of the few sizeable royal towns in a region otherwise carved up between the military orders. Alfonso X granted it a fuero in 1256, John II raised it to the rank of city in 1430 by privilegio rodado, and the Crown added a weekly market privilege in 1465.

Power inside the walls belonged to three lineages, the Altamiranos, the Bejaranos and the Añasco, who brokered council posts between them through the late Middle Ages. The town also held a prosperous morería, with a Mudéjar aljama of up to four hundred people by the end of the 15th century.

Then came the 16th century and the American money. Wealth from colonial ventures funded a wave of building that pushed the city out beyond its walls for good. The clearest single expression of it is the Palacio del Marqués de la Conquista, put up in the last third of the century by Hernando Pizarro under the terms of his brother’s will.

After 1595 the city took in moriscos forcibly moved out of Granada, and between 1610 and 1611 roughly 130 morisco families, about 590 people, were reportedly expelled from Trujillo in turn.

The long decline is easy to date. French occupation during the Peninsular War stripped the city and its hinterland of resources, worst of all between June and September 1811. In 1834 Trujillo became the seat of its own judicial district, and the census of 1842 counted 110 households and 6,026 residents. From imperial fortunes to a market town in three generations, and the palaces stayed put because nobody had the money to replace them.

Visiting

Start at the Oficina Municipal de Información y Turismo on Plaza Mayor, opposite the Palacio de la Conquista. It opens 10:00 to 13:30 in the morning and 16:00 to 19:00 in the afternoon, and it is where you buy tickets and pay for guided tours. The ticketed monuments themselves run 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:30 to 19:00, with the afternoon slot pushed to 17:30 to 20:00 in the summer season up to 15 August.

Entry to any one monument is €2, or €1.50 for groups of ten or more. The bono turístico costs €5.50 and covers five: the castle, Casa-Museo Pizarro, the Centro de los Descubridores, the Torre del Alfiler and the Museo del Traje.

Guided tours leave twice a day, at 11:00 and 16:30, and take about two hours. You book online and pay at the tourist office when you arrive.

Plaza Mayor and San Martín

The church of San Martín de Tours stands on the square itself, documented here in 1353, when the council met in its atrium. Work ran on for centuries under the local architects Sancho de Cabrera, Alonso Becerra and his son Francisco Becerra. Two doors, two eras: the west portal is Renaissance, round-arched between Tuscan columns; the older one, from the end of the 15th century, is the Puerta de las Limas, named for the fruit carved on it, which are actually pomegranates.

Uphill to Santa María la Mayor

From the square the lanes climb to the plazuela de Santa María, where a bronze bust of Francisco de Orellana marks the parish church, begun after the 1232 conquest and only finished in the 18th century with the camarín added behind the apse. The Romanesque Torre Julia was rebuilt in the 1970s after damage from the Lisbon earthquakes of 1521 and 1755. Inside are a Renaissance choir by Sancho de Cabrera and a main retablo by the Salamanca Gothic painter Fernando Gallego, plus the tomb of Diego García de Paredes, the soldier Cervantes called the Sansón Extremeño in the Quixote.

The castle

Keep climbing and the streets end at the fortress. It comes in two parts. The older Islamic section is the square Patio de Armas, ringed by twenty prismatic towers, entered through a horseshoe arch, with two cisterns inside. The polygonal Albacar beyond it holds a 16th-century hermitage to San Pablo, a single nave in three bays under pointed arches. There is no shade up here and the ramparts are the whole point, so time it for early or late.

Coming back down, take the western side and pass under the Arco del Triunfo. On its inner face is the niche of the Virgen de la Victoria and the armorial stones of the Añascos, Bejaranos and Altamiranos; on the outer face, the arms of the Catholic Monarchs with the eagle of Saint John, put there because they paid for the gate’s restoration.

Casa-Museo Pizarro

The museum occupies the site of the Pizarro family’s ancestral house and is run by the town hall. The ground floor is a reconstruction of a 15th-century Spanish hidalgo’s home; the upper floor is an exhibition on Pizarro’s life, mostly original objects with some good copies where originals were not available. It is a small visit, half an hour, and it fills in the domestic scale the palaces do not.

If you can pick your date, come for a fiesta. On Easter Sunday the Chíviri fills Plaza Mayor with people in shepherd dress singing songs written by the local poet Goro, a festival of regional tourist interest. The Feria Nacional del Queso has run since 1985, timed to the 1 May holiday, and turns the square into a tasting floor for cheeses from across Spain. Organisers put attendance at around 100,000 a year. Patronal fiestas fall in the second half of August, and the music, dance and theatre festival that goes with them is staged inside the castle.

Tips

• Buy the €5.50 bono turístico at the tourist office before you start walking, not after. It covers the castle, Casa-Museo Pizarro, Centro de los Descubridores, Torre del Alfiler and Museo del Traje, and beats paying €2 a door from the third monument on.

• Everything ticketed shuts at 14:00 and does not reopen until 16:30, or 17:30 under the summer schedule, which runs until 15 August. A late-morning arrival gives you about ninety minutes of open doors, which is not enough for the castle plus two churches.

• Book the guided tour online rather than turning up for it. Payment happens in person at the tourist office, so the booking form is a request, not a purchase, and staff contact you to confirm.

• The tourist office closes on 24, 25 and 31 December, 1 and 6 January, Easter Sunday and the afternoon of Easter Monday, plus the first Saturday afternoon in September and the whole Sunday after. Easter Sunday is the Chíviri, so that closure is deliberate.

• Around 100,000 people come for the cheese fair on 1 May, in a town of 8,600. Sort a bed months out or plan to sleep elsewhere and drive in.

• Wear shoes with grip. The route from Plaza Mayor to the fortress is a continuous climb on granite setts, and the town sits at 564 m on a rock outcrop rather than a gentle rise.

• Bring binoculars if you have them. Storks nest on the towers and lesser kestrels use the bull-ring, so the birding happens inside the monumental quarter rather than out in the countryside.

• The tourist office answers on WhatsApp as well as by phone, on 927 32 26 77 and 621 296 344, which is the quickest way to check whether a specific monument is open on the day you want it.