Cáceres, Spain
Cáceres is a city and Spanish municipality located in the center of the autonomous community of Extremadura. It is the capital and most populated municipality of the province of Cáceres and houses the headquarters of the Superior Court of Justice of Extremadura.
Cáceres's area of is the greatest of any municipality in Spain. As of 2024, it has a population of 96,448 inhabitants, of which 95,304 live in the city itself. Numerous inhabited places are scattered throughout the municipality, including castles and farmhouses with several centuries of history. The medieval walled city was declared a World Heritage City by UNESCO in 1986.
Since 2008 the city has been organized into four districts: Old Town Center, North, West, and South; a fifth district, Pedanías, covers the non-urban part of the term. The actual municipal population data varies significantly, fluctuating by more than 30,000 people primarily related to educational centers such as the Cáceres Campus of the University of Extremadura or the CEFOT-1 of the Army. The city usually empties in summer, when many residents return to their towns of origin.
Cáceres lies at the feet of the Sierra de la Mosca, a modest hill range. It is part of the Vía de la Plata path of the Camino de Santiago that crosses the west of the Iberian Peninsula in a north–south direction.
The Universidad de Extremadura, and two astronomical observatories are situated in Cáceres. Today, the headquarters of the university as well as several regional government departments are found in Cáceres. The city is also a seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Coria-Cáceres.
Name
No consensus has been reached among historians regarding the etymology of Cáceres, some considering its origin as Roman and others as Arabic. Among philologists consensus is that it is Latin nomenclature distorted by Arabic, until finally adapting to the definitive Christian name, as occurred with at least half the place names of ancient origin in the southern Iberian Peninsula.Regarding its possible Roman origin, two known Latin names could have evolved into the current "Cáceres." One possible derivation is from the colony "Norba Caesarina", "Norba" in honor of the hometown of Gaius Norbanus Flaccus, the Roman general who founded the town, and "Caesarina" in memory of Julius Caesar. The other is from "Castra Caecilia," given by the consul Quinto Cecilio Metelo Pío to one of the military camps near the colony. With any of these toponyms based on "castra", its ablative "castris," which means "in the camp", could have provided the original form of the current "Cáceres."
Historians have debated which of these is the true origin; until the 19th century it was mistakenly thought that Norba Caesarina was the neighboring town of Alcántara, while it was believed that the walled enclosure of Cáceres was Castra Caecilia.
Due to the documentary obscurity of the Visigoth period, it is unclear by what name Caceres was known when the Muslims arrived. Documents from the 3rd and 4th Centuries indicate that the name of the area had been shortened to the colloquial form of "Castris."
The Ravenna Cosmography fixes the use of "Castris" in the 4th century; however, the following mentions of the locality reappear in Muslim texts:
• The Baghdadi geographer Ibn Hawqal referred to a locality called "ḥiṣn Qāṣras" in this place.
• A century and a half later, Al-Idrisi from Ceuta reiterates this name.
• A third source from the end of the Muslim period, written in the late 12th century or early 13th century by Yaqut, suggests that it was renamed "Qāṣr As."
In any case, sources from the time are scarce, since the Muslims never considered Cáceres as an important town beyond its use as a military fortification.
Both the transliteration of the Arabic toponym into the Latin alphabet and the creation of a name in the Romance languages were disparate. In some ancient writings and medieval documents various names appear, such as:
• "Caceres" in a bull of 1168 by Pope Alexander III, awarding the territory to the diocese of Coria in the first Leonese conquest;
• "Castes" in a Castilian document from 1171 by King Alfonso VIII, through which he recognized the Fratres of Cáceres as owners of the land;
• "Carceres" in the mandate of Alfonso IX of León dated in the year 1222 ;
• "Canceres" written the document of 1229 through which Alfonso IX gave concessions to the Order of Santiago.
History
Visitors can see remains from Prehistoric, medieval times, the Roman occupation, Moorish occupation and the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain. Cáceres has four main areas to be explored: the Historical Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, the Modern Center, and the Outskirts.Prehistoric
Settlements have existed near Cáceres since prehistoric times. Evidence can be found in the caves of Maltravieso and . The Maltravieso Cave contains hundreds of paintings, including the world's oldest known cave painting, a red hand stencil older than 67,000 years. This is 20,000 years before the known arrival of Homo Sapiens to Europe, and therefore is believed to have been made by Neanderthals. These paintings date to several of the Upper Paleolithic periods.In the nearby cave, ceramics and lithic utensils have been found that date the occupation of the cave to the Ancient Neolithic ; the possibility that the cave was occupied during the Epipaleolithic period should not be ruled out. Location of trepanned skulls and decorated ceramics suggest that the Maltravieso cave was also occupied during the Bronze Age.
Roman rule
The city was founded by the Romans in 25 BCE. Cáceres as a city was founded as Castra Caecilia by Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius and started to gain importance as a strategic city under Roman occupation. Remains found in the city suggest that it was a thriving center as early as 25 BCE. Some remains of the first city walls built by the Romans in the 3rd and 4th Centuries still exist, including one gateway, the Arco de Cristo.During the 1st Century BCE the Romans settled in camps permanently around the hill where the Norba Caesarina colony would be located next to the important communications route that would later be known as Vía de la Plata.
The old municipality of Aldea Moret, 2 km to the southwest, is currently a neighborhood of the same name integrated into the city, around which two Roman archaeological sites can be seen: Cuarto Roble and El Junquillo. The signposted Vía de la Plata can be traveled south of the city. An excavated section in Valdesalor, where the road crosses the Salor River through a recently restored medieval bridge, occupies the place of an ancient Roman bridge, now lost.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the city was occupied by the Visigoths, until the Arabs conquered Cáceres in the 8th Century. The city spent the next few centuries mostly under Arab rule, although power alternated several times between Moors and Christians. During this time, the Arabs rebuilt the city, comprising a wall, palaces, and various towers, including the Torre de Bujaco. Cáceres was reconquered by the Christians in the 13th Century.
During this period the city had an important Jewish Quarter: in the 15th Century when the total population was 2,000, nearly 140 Jewish families lived in Cáceres. The Jewish population was expelled by Queen Isabel I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon in 1492, but many remains of the Jewish presence of the period can still be seen today in the Barrio San Antonio.
Middle Ages
Around the 5th Century, the Visigoths devastated the Roman settlement; until the 8th-9th Centuries, the city was not heard of again.During the first centuries of the "Reconquista", the Muslims from North Africa took advantage of the strategic place where the primitive Roman colony had been based as a military base to confront the Christian kingdoms of the north. Thus, in 1147 Abd al-Mumin refounded the city on the Hispano-Roman and Visigoth remains. The current name of Vía de la Plata derived from the Arabic name for the Roman road that linked Astorga with Mérida: from the Arabic "balata", from which the word "silver" was derived.
The Christian Reconquest of Cáceres occurred in 1229, the result of a long process spanning from the second half of the 12th century to the beginning of the 13th century. During this period, which began in 1142 with the conquest of Coria, the Tagus River marked an unstable border between Christians to the north and Muslims to the south. The Kingdom of Castile partly ignored the possibilities of conquering this area; attempts to incorporate Cáceres came from the Kingdom of Portugal and the Kingdom of León, which both wanted to expand the width of their southern expansions. The Portuguese Geraldo Sempavor conquered Cáceres in the mid-12th Century in a campaign that began in 1165 and reached the entire center of present-day Extremadura, but an alliance between Ferdinand II of León and the Almohads gave the Leonese control of the town in 1170.
The Almohads carried out an expedition in 1174 in which they regained control of Cáceres. Except for an attempted siege in 1183, the Leonese did not approach the Muslim town again until the 13th Century. After the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, the conquest of Alcántara took place in 1213, after which the Christians besieged Cáceres in 1218, 1222, 1223 and 1225, producing the definitive Reconquest on 23 April 1229. Although the conquest was led by Alfonso IX of León, with Cáceres becoming part of the Kingdom of León, the death of Alfonso IX in 1230 led to Cáceres becoming part of the Crown of Castile and León.
The privileges of the reconquered town were granted by Alfonso IX, configuring Cáceres as a royal town directly dependent on the Leonese Crown with no local government other than its own council. Through this jurisdiction, the Crown reserved a notable portion of land between the Order of Santiago and the Order of Alcántara.
The town had a Jewish community in the Middle Ages, with at least two synagogues recorded before the expulsion of 1492. One is traditionally associated with the present site of the Hermitage of the Holy Spirit outside the city, although the basis of this tradition is uncertain. Archaeological research has identified another synagogue within the neighbourhood of San Antonio de la Quebrada, part of the former Jewish quarter. Following the segregation of Jewish housing in the 1480s, the community was forced to leave this quarter, and the synagogue was leased to a local resident, Diego de Mingolla, in exchange for an annual rent. After the expulsion, the property was confiscated by royal officials, but Mingolla appealed to the Crown, which ordered the synagogue and the adjoining houses to be sold so that the proceeds could cover his claims, with any remaining balance going to the royal treasury.
Cáceres flourished during the Reconquista and the Discovery of the Americas, as influential Spanish families and nobles built homes and small palaces there, and many members of families from Extremadura participated in voyages to the Americas where they made their fortunes.
In the 15th Century, the city suffered from internal disputes among the nobility. The Catholic Monarchs issued several ordinances and provisions to try to pacify the local nobles; The most notable was issued by Isabel I in 1477, during her stay in the town during the War of the Castilian Succession, whereby it was established that the twelve aldermen of the council would become perpetual. The prohibition of stately properties in this jurisdiction prevented the formation of a strong nobility, leaving the town governed by a mesocracy of agricultural knights.
The Old Town still has its ancient walls; this part of town is also well known for its multitude of storks' nests. The walls contain a medieval town setting with no outward signs of modernity, conducive to many television shows and films being shot there.
Cáceres was declared a World Heritage City by UNESCO in 1986 because of the city's blend of Roman, Moorish, Northern Gothic and Italian Renaissance architecture. Thirty towers from the Islamic period still stand in Cáceres, of which the Torre del Bujaco is the most famous.