Burgos

In the centuries that followed, Burgos lived on wool more than on kings. Its merchant families bought the fleeces of the migrating merino flocks, sent them down to Laredo and Bilbao for shipment to Flanders, and brought Flemish cloth back across the Meseta. The city's prosperity showed in its cathedral, where Juan de Colonia, a master mason from Cologne, crowned the main façade with openwork spires between 1442 and 1458. In 1494 Isabella I gave the merchants their own Consulado, a guild that held the monopoly of Castile's wool exports to Flanders and organised the fleets that carried them, so that Castile's trade with the Low Countries now ran through the counting-houses of Burgos.