Village
Medina del Campo is a town of 20,215 inhabitants on the banks of the river Zapardiel, in the southwest of the province of Valladolid, of which it is the fourth most populous municipality; it stands 725 metres above sea level, beside the Noroeste motorway, and is the head town of the Mancomunidad Tierras de Medina, made up of 32 municipalities. Its most popular neighbourhood, La Mota, is located next to the castle of the same name, while recent growth has given rise to neighbourhoods such as Altos de Castilla and Ribera del Zapardiel. It also preserves the Palacio Testamentario, where Isabella the Catholic died, and the only Museo de las Ferias de España, a testimony to its role as a great Castilian trading centre.
Monument
The Collegiate Church of San Antolín, a 16th-century work attributed to Juan Gil de Hontañón, is, together with La Mota Castle, the most important historic building in Medina del Campo, standing on the town's main square and serving as its principal church. Its origins go back to the 12th century, when the town was resettled by communities from the north — Galicians, Leonese, Asturians, Basques, Navarrese and Franks —, each around its own parish; the parish of San Antolín was founded by people from Palencia, in honour of their patron saint. In 1480 Pope Sixtus IV granted it collegiate status; in 1851 it was demoted to a Parroquia Mayor (principal parish). It houses the banner of the Catholic Monarchs, a plateresque altarpiece and a Pietà by Juan de Juni, reminders of a town that became a financial hub of Europe.
Monument
Raised in the fourteenth century with Mudéjar forms, it was a residence of the court and today works as an interpretation centre devoted to Isabel la Católica, who died within its walls at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Monument
The merchant Simón Ruiz, one of the bankers of Charles V and Philip II, funded this hospital in the late 16th century — also called that of the Purísima Concepción and San Diego de Alcalá —, founded by the Jesuit Juan de Tolosa; the complex, in classicist style, was built between 1593 and 1619 to bring together in a single building all the charitable confraternities of Medina del Campo, except for the old Hospital de Barrientos. It is arranged around a square, two-storey arcaded cloister with groin vaults; its façade, bearing the coats of arms of Simón Ruiz, gives access to the hospital on one side and the church on the other, laid out on a Latin-cross plan, with a main altarpiece of 1597 by Pedro de la Cuadra and Francisco del Rincón. It was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (Spain's highest level of heritage protection) on 13 June 1991.
Monument
A 16th-century building where the town's meat supply was controlled during the years of the great fairs, with stone arcades on the ground floor. It was declared a monument on 13 October 1995. Its present structure comes from the plans drawn up by Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón in 1562, as recorded in a long inscription on the south-west façade, dated to the reign of Philip II while Pedro de Vivero was corregidor. It stands beside the river Zapardiel, outside the medieval town, in three naves divided by arcades of Tuscan columns; on the outside, brick arches rest on limestone pillars beneath a dog-tooth cornice of clear Mudéjar influence. Three stone doorways, bearing the town's arms and the royal coat of arms, give access to the building.
Activity
The penitential processions of Medina del Campo, which tradition traces back to the preaching of Saint Vincent Ferrer in 1411, are among the oldest in Spain and have been declared of international tourist interest (the highest tourism recognition granted by the Spanish State). Today nine confraternities take part, with about 2,800 members, in seventeen processions. The earliest brotherhoods arose in the 16th century, such as that of the Virgen de la Misericordia (1542) or the Quinta Angustia (1567), and after a long period of decline the celebrations revived from 1941 onwards, with the confraternities joining together in 1983 in the Junta de Cofradías. On the afternoon of Dolores Friday, the procession of the Virgen de las Angustias, patroness of the town, leaves the Collegiate Church of San Antolín, led by the town council bearing its ceremonial maces.
Historical milestone
The queen died in 1504 in the town's royal palace, where she had made her will on 12 October previously. The building, of Mudejar origin, has been known ever since as the Royal Testamentary Palace.
Historical milestone
On 21 August 1520, in one of the first actions of the Comuneros' War in Castile, the troops of Charles I, commanded by Rodrigo Ronquillo and Antonio de Fonseca, arrived in Medina del Campo — an important trading town with an artillery garrison — to claim it and use it against rebellious Segovia. The corregidor Gutierre Quijada agreed to hand it over, but the townspeople rose up, gathered the artillery pieces in the square and, faced with Fonseca's ultimatum, refused to surrender them, knowing they would be used against their sister city. The royalist response was to set fire to several districts, destroying much of the town and definitively igniting, throughout the Crown of Castile, the Comunero movement that had until then been only incipient.