Béjar

Béjar lies among the mountains south of Salamanca, a town whose history is closely bound to the Zúñiga family and its woollen cloth. Diego López de Zúñiga acquired the town and its dependent villages in 1396. The dukes later encouraged textile manufacture, establishing a dyehouse in 1592 to serve the growing number of clothmakers. The ducal dyehouse enjoyed a long privilege over the dyeing of local cloth. In the later seventeenth century a cloth factory was founded and Flemish workers were brought to Béjar to teach their craft. The trade gave the mountain town an economic identity that endured through the following century.