Cervera

Cervera is the chief town of the Segarra, an upland plain in western Catalonia. Its first settlers were three peasant families who in 1026 occupied empty land on what was then the border between Christian and Muslim territory, and the counts of Barcelona confirmed their holdings and raised the castle of Cervarie to anchor the claim. Once the frontier moved to Lleida in 1149, the village grew into a closed town with its houses built against the wall.

By the Middle Ages the townsmen had won royal privileges and organised themselves as a confraternity in 1182, a consulate in 1202 and, from 1267, the Paeria. A prosperous Jewish community lived here until the expulsions of the fifteenth century. In 1469 the marriage agreement between Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon was signed in Cervera, a step toward joining the two crowns. In 1702 Philip V gave the town the title of city. After the War of the Spanish Succession devastated it, Cervera's envoys pressed for compensation, and the king founded the single university of Catalonia here and closed the rest. Some two thousand students lodged in the town, and its population doubled.