Village
Tábara is a town in the province of Zamora, capital of the comarca of Tierra de Tábara and, for centuries, of the seigneury of the same name, raised to a marquisate in 1541; it sits next to the sierra de la Culebra, in the centre of a depression that was an obligatory passage on the routes of the north-west of the peninsula. Here stood the monastery of San Salvador, founded by San Froilán in the late 9th century by order of Alfonso III, which came to gather six hundred monks and nuns; in its scriptorium, in the late 10th century, the calligrapher Magius began the famous Beatus of Tábara, which his disciple Emeterio finished in the year 968 with the help of Senior and the illuminator Ende. With 743 inhabitants, its Romanesque church of Santa María, a monument since 1931, stands out for its tower.
Monument
A Romanesque church consecrated in 1137 by Bishop Roberto of Astorga on the site of the old monastery of San Salvador; declared a Monumento Nacional (Spain's heritage designation in force until 1931) on 3 June 1931, it preserves side walls, doorways and tower despite the eighteenth-century remodelling.
Monument
The tower rises at the foot of the church, with three storeys separated by chamfered stringcourses and openings on each level, and is all that remains standing of the monastery of San Salvador de Tábara, founded in the late 9th century by San Froilán and San Atilano after the victory of Alfonso III the Great at the Battle of Polvoraria. The monastery came to house a community of more than six hundred monks and nuns, and became famous for the books copied and illuminated in its scriptorium, among them the Beatus of Tábara itself. One of its pages depicts the original monastic tower: the same tower a monk drew around the year 970. After the monastery's disappearance, perhaps razed by Almanzor, the original tower was replaced by the present one, from the 12th century.
Monument
A plain round arch framed by two archivolts decorated with chequerwork, on bevelled imposts and columns at the angles of the jambs; the eastern capital displays oval and concave leaves of very sober line, of the twelfth century.
Curiosity
A commentary on the Apocalypse begun by the master Magio, dead on 13 October 968, and completed by his disciple Emeterio on 27 July 970. It is kept in the Archivo Histórico Nacional and is one of the signed and dated Mozarabic beatus manuscripts.
Curiosity
In the Beatus of Tábara the monastery tower is drawn with the copying workshop inside it and the names of Emeterio and Senior written above their heads: the oldest known representation of a scriptorium in European art.
Curiosity
In the Beatus of Girona, copied here in 975, she signs "Ende pintrix et Dei aiutrix" beside the presbyter Emeterio; she is considered the first woman documented as an illuminator of manuscripts in the medieval West.
Curiosity
Of the good twenty codices of the Commentary on the Apocalypse preserved in the world, three are attributed to the scriptorium of San Salvador, among them the Beatus of Tábara itself and that of Girona: no other peninsular workshop produced so many.
Historical milestone
In the time of Alfonso III, who reigned between 866 and 910, San Froilán built in Tábara a double monastery that hagiographic tradition describes as having hundreds of monks and nuns, and which ended up making the town the largest center on the Peninsula for the production of Beatus manuscripts.
Historical milestone
Charles I granted on 9 September 1541 to Bernardino Pimentel y Enríquez the title of Marquis of Tábara. The town had earlier belonged to the Almansa family, and the new lords raised on the square a Renaissance palace with a Plateresque front.
Monument
On the main square survive ruined walls of the residence that the marquises raised in the sixteenth century, with a Plateresque doorway; part of the same complex was the chapel that is today the church of the Asunción.
Monument
Raised in 1559 as the chapel of the marquis's palace, the Hieronymites occupied it until 1580 and afterwards the Dominicans; beneath the crossing a funerary crypt linked to the lords of the villa was discovered in 1991.
Historical milestone
The disentailment expelled the Dominican community that had occupied the convent since 1580, after having replaced the Hieronymites. The building then lost its conventual function and only the church remained open for worship.
Historical milestone
The residents rioted against a Madrid landowner in the conflict over the use of the lands of the municipal district, one of the most remembered episodes of agrarian agitation in the north of Zamora at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Curiosity
The poet of the exile was born on 11 April 1884 on the calle de los Escribanos, where his father worked as a notary; the three-storey building still stands and a sculpture recalls the author in a small square of the villa.
Monument
Installed in the church of Santa María itself, it brings together facsimiles of the Beatus of Tábara, of that of Girona and of other apocalyptic codices, and explains how the copyists and illuminators worked in the villa's medieval workshop.
Monument
A hermitage situated some five kilometres from the built-up area, in a meadow at the foot of the Sierra de la Culebra. It is the goal of the villa's pilgrimage festival and the setting of the community's festive gatherings since ancient times.
Activity
On the Monday of the octave of Easter the residents walk the five kilometres to the hermitage, with mass, stick dance and an auction of ring-shaped loaves in the meadow before the communal meal and dancing.
Curiosity
A troupe of dancers who clash their sticks following figures handed down from generation to generation; it takes part in the pilgrimage festival of San Mamés and in the patronal festivities, and it is one of the living ritual dances of the north of Zamora.
Monument
The district of San Lorenzo, today part of the town of Tábara, was formerly an autonomous council and later a Jewish quarter, of which lintels bearing inscriptions still survive. Of its medieval hermitage, the religious centre of the old council, a wall of the original structure and the masonry bell-gable remain standing, in good condition despite the building's abandonment; once it fell out of use, a new church with the same dedication was built at another spot in the district. Every 20 January this church honours the martyrs Lawrence of Rome and Fabian, and also celebrates Saint Anthony with the blessing of animals; the district's patronal festival, organised today by the ACD San Lorenzo neighbourhood association, is held on 10 August.
Monument
A flour mill raised on the Casal stream, in the municipal district of Tábara; it documents the use of the small watercourses of the Tábara depression for grinding grain before mechanisation.
Curiosity
The municipal inventory records sites such as Los Barros, El Bosque, El Casal, La Magdalena and the Corral de los Moros, which attest to a settlement in the Tábara depression far earlier than the early medieval monastery.
Nature
The district of Tábara reaches the eastern edge of the Sierra de la Culebra, a range about 65 kilometres long that extends across the Zamora comarcas of Sanabria, Carballeda, Aliste and Tábara as far as the Portuguese border. Included in the Reserva Regional de Caza (Regional Hunting Reserve) created by Law 2/1973 of 17 March and today a ZEPA (Special Protection Area for birds) of the Natura 2000 network, it holds one of the highest densities of Iberian wolf in western Europe, besides being one of the best places in Spain for wildlife watching. Its peaks, formed by a succession of smaller ranges such as those of Cavernas and Roldana, barely exceed a thousand metres, with Peña Mira, at 1,241, as the highest point. Its name may derive either from its undulating shape or from old colonies of snakes.
Nature
The villa sits at 749 metres of altitude in a trough opened at the foot of the Sierra de la Culebra, a corridor of dehesas, holm oak woods and streams that gives its name to the comarca and that in this municipal district alone occupies almost 113 square kilometres.
Activity
A circular itinerary of some two hundred kilometres by mountain bike that starts in Tábara and runs through the sierra along forest tracks among oak woods and heaths, designed to be completed over several days.
Food and drink
The flocks of churra and castellana sheep that graze in the holm oak woods of the municipal district supply the protected designation of origin Queso Zamorano, of pressed paste and long curing, covering the whole province.
Food and drink
At the pilgrimage festival of San Mamés the ring-shaped loaves and buns that the residents carry up to the hermitage are bid up; the auction of the bread is one of the central moments of the day, before the picnic meal.
Food and drink
A local custom of going out into the countryside to eat omelette on Palm Sunday, one of the usages of the Tábara calendar recorded alongside the bonfires of San Antón and the processions of Semana Santa.
Activity
On 15 August the villa celebrates its main festival in honour of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción, with a procession and open-air dances, coinciding with the summer return of the emigrants who left for the Basque Country, Madrid and Catalonia.
Activity
Between San Antón, on 17 January, San Blas, on 3 February, and the feast of the Águedas, the villa keeps up a calendar of blessings of animals and of female rule for a day before the arrival of Lent.
Curiosity
From head of a marquisate to little more than seven hundred residents: the recent register gives some 743 inhabitants and a density of 6.6 per square kilometre, the result of the mass emigration begun around 1960.
Monument
The church of Santa María, beside the N-631 road in Tábara (Zamora), was declared a Monumento Histórico-Artístico del Tesoro Artístico Nacional (a former Spanish heritage-protection designation, predecessor of today's Bien de Interés Cultural) in 1931. The year 970 was recorded here as the date of the Beato de Tábara, whose monks depicted the scriptorium where they copied it, corresponding to the tower of the monastery founded by Froila in the time of Alfonso III, identified with this church. Of that old monastery barely more than the chamber at the base of the present tower survives, entered through a Mozarabic horseshoe arch; the rest, with three naves, comes from renovations begun in the Romanesque period and completed in 1761. The church opens beneath an emblematic tower with two tiers of bells, with two arches on the lower tier and three on the upper; a small modern porch today protects the entrance door at the west front.
Monument
Inside the church is preserved a horseshoe arch on columns of clear Mozarabic flavour and several capitals of the same moment, remains reused from the early-medieval monastery that preceded the present building.
Monument
Of the two Romanesque doors of the church, the one opened to the north has remained walled up since long ago; the interior spreads three naves separated by broad semicircular arches beneath a crossing with a spherical vault and a polygonal apse.
Monument
Among the devotional heritage of the town figures its stone cross, raised next to the roads that made Tábara an obligatory passage of some of the busiest routes of the peninsular northwest.
Monument
The poet was born in Tábara on 11 April 1884 under the name Felipe Camino Galicia. In 1919, on completing the definitive version of his book Versos y oraciones de caminante in Almonacid de Zorita, he adopted for the first time the literary name León Felipe, under which he established himself as one of the great poets in the Spanish language and under which he is sometimes grouped with the Generación del 27, despite belonging to an earlier generation. He lived an eventful life between village pharmacies, the theatre, exile in Mexico and a professorship at Cornell University, and died in Mexico City on 18 September 1968. The square of his home town today preserves a monument to his memory.
Monument
The town hall, a building of the 20th century, presides over a town of 743 inhabitants spread over 112.68 square kilometres, comarca head endowed with a health centre and a grouped rural school.
Nature
Among the catalogued sites of the municipal district —Los Barros, El Bosque, El Casal, La Magdalena, Parador del Vildeo, San Juanico and San Mamed— the Corral de los Moros preserves in its very name the memory of an ancient occupation.
Monument
The Beatus finished here is kept in Madrid with the shelf mark Cod. 1097B: one hundred and seventy-one leaves in quaternions, text in two columns and Mozarabic Visigothic script; it may have been in Guadalupe between 1590 and 1770.
Historical milestone
Bishop Roberto of Astorga consecrated the church under the dedication of Santa María in 1137; the building went on being transformed in the 12th, 14th and 18th centuries and received its last great reform in 1761.
Historical milestone
The parish church was declared Monumento Histórico-Artístico (Spain's heritage designation in force between 1931 and 1985) on 3 June 1931, with the code RI-51-0001027, within the great run of protections approved in the first months of the Second Republic.
Historical milestone
The will granted by the infanta Elvira on 11 November 1099 mentions the possession of Tábara; later the infanta Sancha, sister of Alfonso VII, handed over the whole valley to the Order of the Temple.
Historical milestone
Pedro Pimentel Vigil de Quiñones founded in 1497 the entail that tied the town to his lineage; the lordship had existed since 1371 and on 9 September 1541 Carlos I raised Bernardino Pimentel to the condition of marquis.
Historical milestone
A judicial ruling of 1844 recognised the marquis's retention of his territorial rights and the Supreme Court confirmed it in 1867; at the end of the century the seigneurial rents were sold to José Rodríguez and Andrés Trueba.
Historical milestone
The title received the grandeeship of Spain on 1 March 1729, under the tenth marquis, Miguel Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel; the marquisate came to gather Tábara, Villafáfila, Gordoncillo, Retuerta and half of Puebla de Sanabria.
Historical milestone
The poet went into definitive exile in Mexico in 1938 as cultural attaché of the embassy of the Republic in exile; he died in Mexico City on 18 September 1968, at eighty-four years of age.
Curiosity
In September 1991 there appeared beneath the crossing of the church raised in 1559 a crypt-pantheon that had remained hidden since the departure of the friars, expelled from the town in 1835 by the secularisation.
Curiosity
The convent raised in 1559 next to the palace of the marquis was occupied first by Hieronymite friars and, from 1580, by Dominicans, who remained here for two and a half centuries until the disentailment.
Curiosity
The Catastro de Ensenada counted seventy-four households in 1751 and in 1787 the Tierra de Tábara gathered 1,209 inhabitants; in the middle of the 19th century the town had two hundred houses and some seven hundred dwellers.
Curiosity
The education law of Villar Palasí led in 1970 to the building in Tábara of a comarca school named after the local poet; in 1994 it was transformed into a grouped rural school as the school population fell.
Curiosity
Felipe Camino Galicia took a degree in Pharmacy to please his father, a notary of the town, ran pharmacies and acted in theatre companies before beginning to write in earnest, in Valmaseda, around 1917.
Curiosity
The colophon of the codex dates its conclusion to 27 July of the era 1008, at the eighth hour; master Magio worked on it until 13 October 968 and his disciple finished it in barely three months.
Curiosity
So exclaimed one of the copyists of the monastery when describing the tower of horseshoe arches and bells that appears drawn in the codices; a Romanesque tower of the 12th century afterwards replaced the Mozarabic one.
Nature
Of the whole of the game reserve of the Sierra de la Culebra, some two thousand hectares are managed within the municipal district of Tábara, covered in good part by pine woods planted in the middle of the 20th century.
Nature
The 112.68 square kilometres of the municipality extend at 749 metres of altitude between the last ramps of the Sierra de la Culebra and the plain, and border nine municipal districts, from Ferreras de Arriba to Moreruela de Tábara.
Nature
Rabbits, partridges and hares traditionally populated the pine woods and stubble of the municipal district and sustained a hunting activity that was added to the cattle, goat and sheep raising of the Tierra de Tábara.
Activity
The Sanabrés branch of the Vía de la Plata crosses the town on the way to Santiago; its passage has given movement back to a municipality that lost a good part of its residents with the emigration of the sixties.
Activity
Between the Candelas of February and Christmas, the calendar of the town chains together Semana Santa, the Mayo, San Isidro, Corpus Christi, the bonfires of San Juan and All Saints' Day, as well as the great festivity of August.
Food and drink
The production of the middle of the 19th century was of wheat, rye, pulses and vegetables, with cattle, goats and sheep; from those flocks came the cheeses and the meats that still define the comarca table.