Cáceres

Cáceres sits on a hill at the foot of the Sierra de la Mosca, beside the Roman road later called the Vía de la Plata. The Romans planted the colony of Norba Caesarina here; after the Visigoths wrecked it, the Almohad caliph Abd al-Mumin refounded the town in 1147 as a military base against the Christian north, and the Tower of Bujaco dates from this Muslim period. Alfonso IX of León took Cáceres on 23 April 1229.

His charter made it a royal town with only its own council, and its ban on lordly estates kept a strong high nobility from forming; the town was run instead by a middle rank of landholding knights. In the fifteenth century those families fought one another so fiercely that Isabella, staying here in 1477 during the war of the Castilian succession, made the twelve councillors permanent in an effort to calm them. Cáceres also had a sizeable Jewish quarter around San Antonio, with at least two synagogues, and about 140 Jewish families lived among a population of roughly 2,000 until the expulsion of 1492. The town remained rural until the eighteenth century, when a small bourgeoisie of stockmen and merchants settled as the sheep migrations declined; the Royal Audience of Extremadura was seated here in 1790, and Cáceres became capital of its province in 1822.