Photos

Plaza Mayor - Valladolid

Here you have a representative part of the Main Square ("Plaza Mayor") of the city of Valladolid (my city of birth, which takes up a special room in my heart).

Valladolid has some 320.000 inhabitants and is the capital of the Spanish state of "Castilla-León" (actually the biggest state all over Western Europe). It's both an industrial and cultural capital and presents a very well preserved historical center with very significant buildings and churches from the Golden Spanish Age, many of them from the Renaissance. Actually Valladolid was the capital of the Old Spanish Empire during the XVIth century (until 1559 and again from 1601 to 1606, precisely). It was as well one of the cities where the Castilian writer Cervantes (the writer of "Don Quijote de La Mancha") lived.

The city is crossed by several rivers, the most important is the river Pisuerga, which flows into the river Duero few kilometers far from the city (which flows into the Atlantic Ocean in the Portuguese city of Porto), and the surrounding fields of the city are well known due to the quality of their wines ("Ribera del Duero" & "Rueda").


The Main Square of Valladolid can be compared to other "Plazas Mayores" in Castile like the ones from Salamanca or Madrid, presenting a simple but fine architecture based on a rectangular design and surrounded by low buildings plenty of arcades. In this case the building we see is the City Council and the statue represents the official Christian founder of the city (D. Pedro Ansúrez, 1072), although there were Celtic, Roman and Visigothic settlements in the same area many years before.