Village
Municipality of the comarca of Campo de Montiel, in the province of Ciudad Real, made independent in 1421 by privilege of the infante Enrique and proclaimed by Philip II in 1573 capital of the Campo de Montiel, a standing that left it a fabric of armorial houses and Renaissance palaces and earned it the title of city in 1895; its centre was declared a historic-artistic ensemble in 1974. Francisco de Quevedo died here in a cell of the convent of Santo Domingo and here his remains lie, solemnly returned in 2007 to the crypt of the church of San Andrés after the identification studies of the Complutense University, whose team pointed in 2004 to the town as the place in La Mancha whose name Cervantes did not wish to recall.
Monument
A square on a trapezoidal plan built at the beginning of the 17th century, with characteristic arcades and balconies. It brings together the town's main civil and religious institutions.
Monument
Temple that presides over the Plaza Mayor, with a notable plateresque pulpit. In the crypt of the Bustos chapel lie the remains of Francisco de Quevedo. Documents from the time of Philip II describe the church as having an extremely fine tower, built of ashlar stone with numerous windows and originally topped by a spire of black slate and lead, similar to the buildings of El Escorial.
Monument
The convent where Francisco de Quevedo died on 8 September 1645, which preserves the cell where he spent his last days. Material from the Fundación Francisco de Quevedo is displayed in its refectory.
Monument
The most artistic of the seigneurial houses of Infantes, with a neoclassical façade dominated by a great round arch framing the doorway and an inner courtyard with Ionic columns.
Monument
A building put up in the mid-16th century as a communal granary and trading house, and turned into a prison in 1719. It preserves a fine inner courtyard with columns with Tuscan capitals.
Monument
A gentleman's house in Infantes identified with the home Cervantes describes in the second part of Don Quixote when he introduces don Diego de Miranda, the Knight of the Green Coat.
Monument
Sanctuary of the patron saint of Villanueva de los Infantes, Our Lady of la Antigua, a 13th-century carving known in the Middle Ages as Santa María de Jamila. She was canonically crowned on the last Saturday of May 2000 by the prior bishop of Ciudad Real. Her feast day is celebrated on 8 September, the Nativity of Our Lady, and on the second-to-last weekend of August a verbena is also held in her honour.
Curiosity
The town became independent on 10 February 1421 by privilege of the infante Enrique, and in 1573 Felipe II proclaimed it the capital of the Campo de Montiel. Its centre was declared a historic-artistic ensemble in 1974 and in 2017 it joined Los Pueblos Más Bonitos de España.
Curiosity
Quevedo's remains lay for 150 years in the crypt of the Bustos family in the church of San Andrés. After identification studies by the Complutense University of Madrid, in May 2007 they were solemnly returned to the crypt inside an iron urn.
Activity
On the first weekend of September Villanueva de los Infantes cooks a colossal pisto manchego that won it a Guinness record for the largest pisto ever cooked.
Activity
The festival of Santo Tomás de Villanueva honours the patron saint of Villanueva de los Infantes, where he spent his entire childhood and youth, although he was born in 1486 in a nearby farmhouse on the road to Fuenllana, where his family had moved because of a plague epidemic. Part of the saint's family house is still preserved, with a coat of arms on the corner, next to an oratory. He entered the Order of Saint Augustine in Salamanca in 1516 and was ordained a priest in 1518; he became famous for his personal austerity and his charity towards orphans, the poor and the sick, whom he sought to provide with work rather than alms. In 1544 he was appointed archbishop of Valencia, a post he held until his death in 1555.
Curiosity
The grammarian and humanist Bartolomé Jiménez Patón, born in Almedina in 1569, carried out his work in Villanueva de los Infantes, where he was a teacher and friend of Quevedo, contributing to the town's intellectual prestige during the Golden Age. He studied at the Jesuits' Colegio Imperial in Madrid, where he met Lope de Vega, whom he always admired, and later trained at the universities of Baeza and Salamanca. In 1600 he settled in Villanueva de los Infantes after accepting a chair in Humanities, and combined teaching with posts such as notary of the archive of the Inquisition of Murcia and postmaster of the town. Among his scholarly works, his translations and commentaries on Martial, Horace's Odes and Juvenal's Satires stand out. He died in the same town in 1640.
Historical milestone
The infante Enrique of Aragon, administrator of the mastership of Santiago, granted the title of villa to the place that until then was called La Moraleja; the definitive name of Villanueva de los Infantes was fixed around 1480.
Historical milestone
Francisco de Quevedo died in a cell of the convent of Santo Domingo in Villanueva de los Infantes, ill and withdrawn after years of imprisonment and lawsuits. He was buried in the parish church of the town he had frequented since 1610.
Historical milestone
The regent María Cristina raised to city status in 1895 Villanueva de los Infantes, which had spent three centuries acting as head of the Campo de Montiel and had accumulated a fabric of armorial houses and Renaissance palaces without equal in the province.
Historical milestone
A multidisciplinary team from the Complutense University published in 2004 a study which, cross-referencing the distances and travel times of the Quixote, pointed to Villanueva de los Infantes as the place in La Mancha whose name Cervantes did not wish to recall.
Food and drink
An unusual salad made with the pulp of the lemon cut into pieces, onion, olive oil, salt and paprika, to which cod or hard-boiled egg is sometimes added. It refreshes the comarca's heavy stews and is a mark of identity of the Infantes tables.