Village
Municipality of the comarca of Talavera, in the province of Toledo, heir to the Roman municipium of Caesarobriga, raised beside one of the few practicable fords of the Tagus, and the scene in July 1809 of the battle that pitted the allied Spanish and British armies against the Napoleonic troops; it preserves the basilica of Nuestra Señora del Prado, with a Renaissance body of three naves and a domed Baroque chapel, and the collegiate church of Santa María la Mayor, a Gothic-Mudéjar temple of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and its craft processes of ceramics were inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 on the list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Monument
Sanctuary of the patroness of Talavera de la Reina, raised on the outskirts of the ancient Caesarobriga on a Roman cult site dedicated to Pales and Ceres, deities of agriculture, in whose honour festivals were held from which today's Mondas descend. The site was Christianised in Visigothic times, when King Liuva II presented the city with the earliest image of the Virgin of the Prado, and after the Reconquest the church was rebuilt in Mudejar style. In the 16th century the three-naved Renaissance building was raised that forms the oldest part of the present church, of which Philip II said it was the queen of hermitages; in 1649 the Baroque main chapel was added, with a Latin-cross plan and a large dome, under the direction of friar Lorenzo de San Nicolás. In 1989 it became a minor basilica and it has been a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) since 1993.
Curiosity
The church holds ceramic panels of the 16th to 20th centuries depicting the genealogy of Christ and scenes from the life of the Virgin. This display of Talavera tilework has earned it the nickname of the Sistine Chapel of ceramics.
Curiosity
In 1989 Pope John Paul II signed the bull that raised the hermitage of Nuestra Señora del Prado to the rank of minor basilica, the status it has held ever since.
Curiosity
Tradition attributes to Philip II the description of the Prado sanctuary as the queen of hermitages, an expression still used to refer to the Talavera basilica.
Monument
Gothic-Mudejar church built between the 14th and 15th centuries, popularly known as La Colegial. It has three naves with polygonal apses and ribbed vaults, and its tower was finished in Baroque style at the beginning of the 18th century. It was declared a Monumento Histórico-Artístico Nacional (Spain's heritage designation in force between 1931 and 1985) in 1931.
Curiosity
The front of Santa María la Mayor bears a flamboyant Gothic rose window made in the 15th century with Mudejar brickwork techniques, an unusual solution that has become an emblematic image of Talavera.
Monument
Fifteenth-century Gothic cloister attached to the collegiate church of Santa María la Mayor, which houses several funerary monuments of the same century. It contains the burial place of Fernando de Rojas (c. 1465-1541), author of La Celestina.
Monument
The chapel of the Collegiate Church of Talavera preserves The Apparition of Santa Leocadia to San Ildefonso and King Recceswinth, an oil painting measuring 266 by 156 centimetres, dated 1592, above the tombstone, the work of Blas de Prado, a Mannerist painter probably born around 1545 in Camarena (Toledo) and who died in Madrid around 1599. His technique of light, assured brushwork, with Italian influences arriving through El Escorial and through prints rather than through a journey to Italy, shows Venetian echoes alongside features recalling the style of El Greco.
Monument
Chapel of the Colegial of Talavera presided over by an altarpiece made in ceramics by the Ruiz de Luna workshop, an example of the use of Talavera tilework in 20th-century religious art.
Monument
Fourteenth-century church which, according to some hypotheses, was built over a former synagogue. It preserves a chancel altarpiece made on 18th-century Talavera tilework and an organ of the same century. It is a Mudejar work of rectangular plan and three naves, built of brick, marble and materials of Roman and Visigothic origin; its west front shows a rose window of brick tracery above a frieze of pointed, multifoil horseshoe arches, and beside the south side stands a loggia in Renaissance-Mudejar style. The historian Juan de Ferreras (1652-1735), author of an extensive Historia de España, was parish priest of this church; declared a Monumento Histórico-Artístico (former heritage-protection category, precursor to today's Bien de Interés Cultural) in 1931, it is today a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection).
Monument
Church rebuilt in the 16th century which preserves an octagonal Mudejar coffered ceiling and a 17th-century altarpiece.
Monument
The church of El Salvador, or church of El Salvador de los Caballeros, stands on the old Corredera del Cristo, in the outskirts of Talavera de la Reina. It is a Catholic church in Gothic-Mudejar style whose construction began in the 12th century; there is documentary evidence of its existence from 1204, when it was the seat of the Castilian court that dispensed justice to residents subject to that charter. Notable is its brick apse, with interlaced arches on the second and third tiers that ripple into narrow lobed arches. Deconsecrated in 2014-2015, the former church now serves as a cultural and exhibition centre.
Monument
The church of San Prudencio, in the historic centre of Talavera de la Reina, is part of the Jeronymite conventual complex of Santa Catalina, also called San Jerónimo, founded by the Archbishop of Toledo Pedro Tenorio in 1397 and protected as a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) since 1992. The church was begun in 1455 and opened in 1469; in 1536 it was enlarged with a new main chapel and an octagonal Renaissance sacristy, whose construction came to threaten collapse and forced the summoning of Juan de Herrera, leaving cracks still visible today. After Mendizábal's disentailment, the monastery was closed and sold in 1835 and passed through various uses until in 1909 the Fundación Aguirre acquired it to house the Asilo de San Prudencio, from which the complex takes its present name.
Monument
Founded in 1372 by Archbishop Pedro Tenorio and later occupied by the Hieronymites, it preserves its church, cloister and monastic quarters. Some of its former industrial buildings now house the Ethnographic Museum.
Monument
The monastery of San Benito is a female Cistercian community in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo) and the oldest in the city. According to tradition, its origin lies in a women's monastery founded in the 7th century outside the city walls, where Saint Florentina of Cartagena died in the year 615. By the 12th century there already existed a community known as San Antolín de las Dueñas, and in 1126 the Archbishop of Toledo don Raimundo ordered its transfer inside the walled precinct, adopting the Cistercian reform and the new name of San Benito. Its cloister, from the 16th century and in Isabelline style, together with some remains of the town wall, bear witness to centuries of the community's civil and religious history.
Monument
An Augustinian convent refounded in 1566 by Saint Alonso de Orozco, the driving force behind the reform of the Augustinian Recollects in the city. It now houses the Ruiz de Luna Ceramics Museum.
Monument
A former Carmelite convent that was at one point used as a ceramics factory. It now houses a library and preserves a 19th-century pottery workshop.
Monument
Talavera de la Reina (Toledo) once had three walled precincts, tangential to the Islamic alcazaba, of which a good part of the first and some remains of the second survive today; the complex is declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in the category of monument. The first precinct, called La Villa, was built on the orders of Abd al-Rahman III in the 9th-10th centuries beside the alcazaba; it is possibly the only wall of its type preserved in Spain, with ashlar blocks reused from Roman buildings. It preserves eight of its seventeen albarrana towers, already from Christian times, between the 13th and 14th centuries. The second and third precincts, from the 12th and 13th centuries, protected the outer districts and were built of rammed earth, today almost gone through lack of maintenance and the demolitions of the 19th century.
Monument
In the 13th century the wall was reinforced with seventeen rectangular albarrana towers spaced along its entire length. Eight of them survive today.
Monument
Stretch of the medieval Talavera town wall next to the church of El Salvador, one of the best-preserved and most visitable sectors of the defensive perimeter. The walled complex of Talavera de la Reina, of which this stretch is part, was declared a Monumento Histórico-Artístico (former heritage-protection category, precursor to today's Bien de Interés Cultural) in 1931.
Monument
A tower of Talavera's walled enclosure whose masonry incorporates a Vetton stone boar reused as an ashlar block, popularly known as the Moor's Head.
Monument
Known as the Old Bridge, it is the historic crossing over the Tagus at Talavera, Roman in origin and remodelled in 1483. It was listed as a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) in 2021.
Monument
The Iron Bridge crosses the river Tagus at Talavera de la Reina. Its history goes back to 1870, although work did not begin until 1904, to a design by the engineer Luis Barber; its opening in 1908 marked a milestone for the city, improving communications with the Jara district, Extremadura and Andalusia, and represented the application of the constructive techniques born of the Industrial Revolution. With a length of 426 metres, divided into ten iron-and-steel spans on concrete piers, it was restored in 1994. Today officially named Queen Sofía Bridge, it remains one of the symbols of iron engineering in Talavera.
Monument
The Castilla-La Mancha Bridge, a cable-stayed structure built between 2007 and 2011 over the Tagus as it passes through Talavera de la Reina, was designed as part of a ring road that was never completed. Its central pylon, 192 metres tall, is the highest in Spain and the second-highest in Europe; from it run 152 cables totalling 33 kilometres, which support the country's longest unsupported cantilevered span, at 318 metres. The project, promoted by the Junta de Comunidades and designed by Estudio AIA, used 72,000 m³ of concrete and 10,000 tonnes of steel, at a cost of close to 74 million euros; it was opened on 17 October 2011, after the rupture of one of its stay cables was repaired months earlier. Its mast is today the contemporary landmark of the city's skyline.
Monument
The Prince Philip Bridge, also known as the New Bridge, is one of the four urban crossings of the Tagus in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo), together with the Old Bridge of Santa Catalina, the Iron Bridge or Queen Sofía Bridge, and the Castilla-La Mancha Bridge. It was opened on 12 July 1973 by the then Minister of Public Works, Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, to eliminate the queues of vehicles that formed daily at the entrance to the Iron Bridge. It has a deck 19 metres wide, with two separate carriageways of two lanes each and pedestrian walkways, and a length of 805 metres divided into 38 spans of prestressed concrete.
Monument
The Plaza del Pan is the main square of Talavera de la Reina and the heart of the old town, presided over by the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor, a Gothic church begun in the 12th century. Rectangular in shape and about 4630 m², it already hosted jousts and tournaments in the Middle Ages; today its centre gathers fountains and Talavera ceramic benches amid greenery. The historic-artistic ensemble surrounding it also includes the former archbishop's palace, seat of the town hall where the writer Fernando de Rojas served as mayor, medieval buildings, the present town hall, the Hospital de la Misericordia, today the Rafael Morales Cultural Centre, and remains of the Roman temples of Jupiter and Vespasian beside the forum.
Monument
Housed in the former Hospital de la Misericordia, a building raised over the remains of the city's Roman forum. It is named after the Talavera poet Rafael Morales and stands on the Plaza del Pan.
Monument
The Ruiz de Luna Ceramics Museum, in Talavera de la Reina, was created by the ceramicist Juan Ruiz de Luna as a repository for his private collection, and handed over to the town council after his death. Housed in his former workshops on the Plaza del Pan, it moved in 1996 to the 16th-century convent of San Agustín, in the old town, a complex made up of the former church, with a Baroque Talavera façade by friar Lorenzo de San Nicolás, and the conventual building, used after disentailment as a warehouse and school. It brings together pieces from the 16th to the 20th century, with butterfly, fern and swallow-and-palm series, examples of oriental and Mexican influence, and archaeological objects found during work on the building.
Monument
It occupies an 18th-century oil mill and tannery that once belonged to the former monastery of Santa Catalina. Its rooms are devoted to Las Mondas, to the Galanes pottery workshop and to the city's traditional shops.
Monument
The Victoria Theatre was built in 1912 on the site of the former 17th-century comedy playhouse, demolished in 1892, and later took the name Teatro Mariana in honour of the Talavera-born historian father Juan de Mariana. Its façade, of three storeys and symmetrical composition, combines Modernist architecture with tilework by Juan Ruiz de Luna, featuring allegories of music and theatre, portraits of playwrights and musicians and the names of zarzuelas, as well as ornate metal balconies and iron wall lamps. The interior has plasterwork decoration, with wrought-iron balustrades and metal pillars. Reacquired by the town council, it was restored in 1991.
Monument
A leading performance venue in Talavera de la Reina which, together with the Teatro Victoria, forms part of the city's cultural circuit.
Monument
The main entrance to Talavera's town hall, one of the outstanding civic features along the monumental route through the city centre.
Monument
The arch was built in 1943, during the term of mayor Justiniano López Brea, as a monumental triple-arched gateway giving access to the Jardines del Prado of Talavera de la Reina. It preserves on its three faces the tilework decoration produced by the Ruiz de Luna workshops, a leading ceramicist in the Talavera tradition.
Nature
Historic 19th-century urban park in the centre of Talavera de la Reina, province of Toledo, declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) as a historic garden since 2019. Opened with its present layout in 1928 as the gardens of Alfonso XIII, it follows the French model in its design. It houses the basilica of Nuestra Señora del Prado, patroness of the city, in Baroque style and raised over an ancient Roman temple dedicated to Ceres, next to the bullring where the bullfighter Joselito El Gallo died. Its walks are lined with brick benches with backs and plinths of Talavera tilework, and the complex also includes the Duck Pond, the Frog Fountain and a monumental triple-arched gateway raised in 1943.
Curiosity
A fountain in the Jardines del Prado made of Talavera ceramics, one of the most photographed features of the gardens.
Nature
The Tagus runs through the city and shapes its landscape, crossed by four urban bridges. Its banks hold Talavera's main natural and leisure areas.
Nature
The Parque de la Alameda is an extension of the Jardines del Prado of Talavera de la Reina, created in 1982 following the layout of an English garden. It has a central lake and two bridges faced with traditional Talavera ceramics, as well as sports and leisure facilities and the fairground where the Feria de Talavera is held. It borders the bank of the river Tagus, from where the bridges crossing the city and the island of El Chamelo can be seen.
Nature
A green space beside the Tagus covered with tamarisks and white poplars, designed for quiet walks along the riverbank.
Nature
A green area beside the Old Bridge and the River Tagus, valued for its ecological interest and for its accessibility for outdoor leisure.
Nature
The green corridor running along the Talavera bank of the Tagus preserves stretches of vegetation with white poplar, willows and tamarisk, although much of this riverbank is degraded through neglect and the lack of restoration work. A 2011 project proposes acting on 250 hectares between the Alberche bridge and the New Bridge to create a peri-urban natural park, with restoration of the riverside forest, river beaches, cycle lanes, sports facilities and leisure areas.
Nature
A small reservoir north of the city, surrounded by riverside vegetation and frequented by water birds. It is a popular spot for sport and family outings.
Nature
A route of more than a thousand kilometres that follows the course of the longest river on the Iberian Peninsula and is certified as a GR-113 long-distance footpath. Its course crosses the municipal district of Talavera alongside the Tagus.
Curiosity
The city's second name dates from 24 June 1328, when Alfonso XI of Castile married his cousin María of Portugal and gave her Talavera as a wedding gift.
Curiosity
During the Second Republic the municipality temporarily changed its name to Talavera del Tajo, dropping the monarchical reference in its historic name.
Curiosity
In December 2019 UNESCO inscribed the craft processes of Talavera-style ceramics on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, in a joint nomination with El Puente del Arzobispo and with Puebla and Tlaxcala in Mexico.
Curiosity
Although Talavera's pottery workshops have taken up the electric wheel, the modelling, decorating, glazing and firing processes remain handmade and practically identical to those used in the 16th century.
Curiosity
The ceramicist Juan Ruiz de Luna was born in Noez (Toledo) in 1863 and died in Talavera de la Reina in 1945, heir to the ceramic tradition of this city, famous since the Golden Age. He amassed a large collection of Talavera earthenware, acquired from his heirs in 1963, which forms the founding collection of the museum that bears his name. He passed on his craft to several of his sons: Juan, Rafael and Antonio Ruiz de Luna Arroyo became noted ceramicists, while another of them, Salvador, was a music composer.
Curiosity
The Ethnographic Museum devotes one of its rooms to the Galanes pottery workshop, the last traditional Talavera ceramics workshop, whose tools are preserved as a record of the trade.
Curiosity
Talavera's Ethnographic Museum recreates the city's traditional shops, with Cándido Martín's celebrated hat shop among its best remembered evocations.
Curiosity
Fernando de Rojas, born in La Puebla de Montalbán (Toledo) around 1465, died in Talavera de la Reina in 1541, a city where he spent much of his life. Although he has gone down in history as the author of La Celestina, to his contemporaries he was above all a highly regarded jurist, who came to serve as chief magistrate and to hold public office in this town, then dependent on the lordship of the Archbishopric of Toledo. His converso origin and his family's possible Jewish ancestry, noted by some researchers on the basis of inquisitorial proceedings, remain a matter of debate among scholars. He was buried in the cloister of the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor, where his tomb is still commemorated.
Historical milestone
In the battle, fought on 27 and 28 July 1809, Wellesley's 20,000 British soldiers, after marching along the valley of the Tagus, joined General Cuesta's 33,000 Spaniards to face 46,000 French troops under Marshal Claude Victor and General Sébastiani, under the effective command of Marshal Jourdan. The French crossed the river Alberche on the afternoon of the 27th and attacked the Spanish and British flank, taking and then losing a strategic hill; at dawn on the 28th they tried again, but were repelled by the 29th and 48th infantry regiments, which charged with the bayonet. After intense cannon fire, the French withdrew, leaving wounded men and two artillery brigades on the field. For this action, Wellesley was ennobled as Viscount Wellington of Talavera.
Curiosity
A rise between the Tagus and the Portiña stream that was the key position in the 1809 battle. Together with the Cascajal hill, the Vergara barn and the Salinas house, it forms the historic setting of the fighting.
Curiosity
Talavera preserves traces of its Vetton past, among them a stone boar reused as an ashlar block in the Torre del Polvorín, popularly called the Moor's Head, along with other examples found in the municipal district.
Curiosity
King Sancho IV granted Talavera the privilege of holding two agricultural fairs a year, the origin of today's San Isidro fair in May and San Mateo fair in September.
Curiosity
The festival has its roots in the offerings that Roman farmers and herdsmen made to the goddess Ceres using baskets called mundus, the term from which the word mondas is said to derive.
Curiosity
The three Talavera-born siblings were martyred in Ávila around the year 304, in the time of Diocletian. In 1603 a hermitage under their patronage was blessed in Talavera, beside the cemetery opened after the plague of 1599. According to tradition, Vicente, the eldest, took charge of his sisters Sabina and Cristeta when they were orphaned; denounced as a Christian before the Roman prefect Publio Daciano, he refused to renounce his faith and, taken to the temple of Jupiter to be sacrificed, the stone softened beneath his feet, leaving his footprints marked, today venerated on a slab preserved in Talavera. The three siblings then fled to the mountain range that today bears their name, but were finally captured and martyred in Ávila.
Curiosity
Born in Talavera de la Reina on 31 July 1919, Rafael Morales was one of the most widely read and most frequently reprinted Spanish poets of the 20th century. The cultural centre on the Plaza del Pan bears his name.
Curiosity
The building of the former Hospital de la Misericordia, now a cultural centre, stands over the remains of the forum of the Roman city, a testimony to the past of Caesarobriga.
Curiosity
Tradition and some evidence place a Roman temple dedicated to Jupiter beneath Santa María la Mayor, which would explain the sacred continuity of the site over two millennia.
Curiosity
Of the seventeen albarrana towers built in the 13th century to reinforce Talavera's wall, only eight survive, and today they can be visited as an open-air museum of the medieval city.
Curiosity
With more than eighty thousand inhabitants, Talavera de la Reina is the second-largest municipality in the province of Toledo and the fourth in Castilla-La Mancha by population, after Albacete, Guadalajara and the capital itself, Toledo. According to the 2025 INE figures it has 83803 inhabitants. Known as the City of Ceramics for its pottery tradition and also as the City of the Tajo, it is the head of one of the most populous judicial districts in the province and the centre of an urban area that serves towns in the Tiétar valley in Ávila and the north-east of Extremadura.
Activity
An ancestral festival in honour of the Virgin of the Prado, declared a Fiesta de Interés Turístico Nacional (Spain's designation for festivals of national tourist interest) in 2009, combining religious, cultural and festive events over a whole week around Easter. Its roots go back to a Roman ritual of veneration of the goddess Ceres at the arrival of spring, Christianised in the year 602, when the Visigothic king Liuva II gave the city the image of the Virgin of the Prado, to which offerings have been made ever since. It begins on Easter Sunday with the Pregón de Mondas (Proclamation of Mondas) and a week of talks and concerts, and culminates the following Saturday with a procession of folk groups and floats that crosses the city bearing traditional offerings to the Basilica of the Prado.
Activity
A grand parade that is the central event of the festival, with folk groups representing the villages of the comarca taking part with their own music and dances.
Activity
Talavera's main fair, heir to the medieval fair privilege granted by Sancho IV, with bullfighting events, concerts and popular activities.
Activity
Talavera's spring fair, linked to the patron saint of farmers and one of the two annual fairs historically granted to the city.
Activity
A Passion-themed celebration with processions of Talavera's confraternities through the historic centre of Talavera de la Reina, declared a Fiesta de Interés Turístico Regional (Castilla-La Mancha's designation for festivals of regional tourist interest) of Castilla-La Mancha, which links directly with the start of the Las Mondas festival.
Activity
The canoeing routes along the urban stretch of the Tajo as it passes through Talavera de la Reina are guided descents that allow visitors to view its three historic bridges from the water. The oldest is the Old Bridge, or Santa Catalina Bridge, with possible Roman foundations; next comes the Iron Bridge, or Queen Sofía Bridge, opened on 25 October 1908, 426 metres long and supported by two abutments and nine piers forming ten iron-and-steel spans of 41 metres each; and the most modern, the Prince Felipe Bridge, opened on 12 July 1973, 19 metres wide and 805 metres long in total including its approaches.
Activity
Every weekend the town council organises hiking and canoeing outings to promote the local heritage and reveal the landscapes of the Talavera comarca.
Historical milestone
Pliny the Elder, in the 1st century, mentions the caesarobrigenses among the communities of Roman Lusitania. The settlement of Caesarobriga, predecessor of Talavera de la Reina, made use of one of the few passable fords across the Tajo, and from it derive the layout of the old town and the remains found beneath the city center.
Historical milestone
Arab sources record the stronghold of Talavera de la Reina under the name Talabira as early as the year 713, during the Muslim expansion across the Peninsula. From that period come the rammed-earth walled enclosure and the network of narrow streets that survives beside the river.
Historical milestone
The troops of Alfonso VI took the town in 1083, two years before Toledo, because controlling this crossing of the Tajo was a precondition for besieging the taifa capital. The stronghold remained the head of an extensive alfoz on the Tajo frontier.
Historical milestone
During the Middle Ages and the Ancien Régime, Talavera de la Reina belonged to the lordship of the Archbishopric of Toledo, which appointed its authorities and collected its revenues. Hence the density of convents, the collegiate church and the vicariate that still shape the profile of the old town.
Historical milestone
Alfonso Martínez de Toledo was archpriest of the collegiate church from 1427 and finished in 1438 the Reprobación del amor mundano, known as the Corbacho. His spoken, satirical prose made it one of the heights of pre-Renaissance Castilian literature.
Historical milestone
Born in 1428 and known as Hernando de Talavera, he was a Hieronymite, confessor to Isabel the Catholic between 1475 and 1492 and first archbishop of Granada after the conquest. He defended the peaceful evangelisation of the Moriscos and died in 1507.
Historical milestone
In the sixteenth century several potters of the town established themselves in Puebla de los Ángeles and taught glazed earthenware there, the origin of the so-called talavera poblana. Mexico protected that ceramic with a designation of origin of its own in 1997.
Historical milestone
The Jesuit Juan de Mariana was born here on 2 April 1536. His Historia general de España, published in 1601, was the canonical version of the national past until the nineteenth century, and his treatise De rege opened the debate on the limits of royal power.
Historical milestone
Fernando VI founded it in 1748 on the advice of the marquis of la Ensenada. It produced velvets, ribbons, stockings and gold thread and came to employ some four thousand workers by around 1785. Valencian competition gradually put it out until its closure in 1862.
Historical milestone
The laying of the railway from Madrid to Cáceres and Portugal reached the city in 1876 and hooked it into the trade of the meseta. The station fixed the growth of the new quarter to the north and served as an outlet for earthenware and cereals.
Historical milestone
On 3 September 1936 the African columns commanded by Yagüe, with Castejón and Asensio at their head, broke the Republican lines. It was the last important obstacle of the Tajo valley and its fall opened the road to Toledo and to Madrid.
Food and drink
Slow fry-up of pepper, onion, courgette and tomato from the Tajo plain, served sometimes with egg or with loin from the earthenware jar. It is the city's summer dish and it is traditionally presented in a dish of local glazed ceramic.
Food and drink
Thick stew of dried chickpeas with spinach, desalted salt cod, onion, carrot, garlic and sweet paprika. It is the fast-day dish of Lent and of Semana Santa and it is served in the eating houses of the old town throughout the winter.
Food and drink
Sardines opened and marinated with garlic, parsley, paprika and vinegar before being put in the pan or on the grill. The recipe came with the salted fish that travelled up from the coast along the royal roads and was fixed as a dish of the city.
Food and drink
Black-eyed beans, small and with a dark mark on the eye, are stewed with rice, garlic and paprika as a spoon dish for the cold months. They were grown in the market gardens of the plain and remain a classic of Talavera home cooking.
Food and drink
Buns of flour and anise that are handed out at festivities and religious celebrations, heirs to the distributions of blessed bread by the confraternities. They are made in the oven and accompany sweet wine at the snacks of the local festive calendar.
Food and drink
Sweet flavoured with orange blossom water that is made for the spring festivity of las Mondas and sums up the taste for spices and flowers inherited from Andalusi cooking. It is found only in the city's confectioners' at those dates.