Today's Place to Daydream about: Zamora

To get a really great collection of medieval buildings, what you need is a place that was a lot more important in the Middle Ages than it has ever been since. Like Zamora, which boasts 24 Romanesque churches.

Zamora is a city in sort of west-central Spain, not far from the northeastern corner of Portugal. It lies along the Duero River and is an ancient place, occupied by Bell Beaker people in the early Bronze Age and pretty much everyone since. The Romans called it Occelum Durii, which wikipedia translates as Eye of the Duero. Above are a Roman mosaic and three Visigothic gold crosses, all now in the city museum. Pretty much all we know of the city in the Visigothic period comes from archaeology, including two coins that seems to show that the city was then named Semure.

Church of St. John the Baptist

The real documentary history begins with the Arab conquest. In the 710s the town was conquered by Musa ibn Nusayr, who left a Berber garrison there. But then the Berbers fell out with the Arabs, leading to what the sources I have found call "the Arab-Berber strifes." This created an opening for King Alfonso I of Asturias, who retook the place for Christendom. Or so he claimed, anyway; documentation for this period is very thin and there seems to be some doubt.

Church of St. Mary Magdalen

Arab chronicles tell us that a bishopric was founded in the town some time around AD 900, and that the town was "repopulated." The same sources tell us that the Christians hired Mozarab builders from Toledo to construct their cathedral. So the town was alive again; it may have been, although again documentation is very thin, one of the most populous Christian towns in Iberia. This however had the unfortunate effect, from the Christian perspective, of putting it back on the radar of the Muslim leadership. The town was attacked by Ibn Al-Qitt, some sources say in 901, and then several more times over the succeeding decades. It was finally retaken by the great Muslim ruler Al Mansur –Almanzor in Spanish – in 966.

St. Mary Magdalen, North Door

The place returned to Christian control during the reign of Alfonso V of León, sometime around the year 1000. Alfonso encouraged Franks from Burgundy, Poitou and Provence to move to the town, and he had a new city wall built to protect them. This began Zamora's great era of prosperity, which lasted for about 250 years, leaving us the remarkable collection of Romanesque wonders.

Cathedral

According to wikipedia, 

Zamora was also the scene of fierce fighting in the 15th century, during the conflict between the supporters of Isabella the Catholic and Juana la Beltraneja. The Spanish proverb, No se ganó Zamora en una hora, literally, Zamora wasn't won in an hour, is a reference to these battles. It is the Spanish equivalent of the English proverb "Rome wasn't built in a day."

After that the place seems to have declined. It was later known mainly for the number of its citizens that emigrated to the New World, founding new Zamoras all over Central and South America. The gold and silver altars above must have been donated by sons who made good across the ocean.

But there are a few nice buildings from that period, such as this 16th-century merchant's house, now part of the city museum.

The  town is full of delightful streets and squares, with a eight hundred-year-old church on almost every block.

The 13th-century bridge.

Not far from Zamora is one of the most famous of all Romanesque churches, the Collegiate Church of Toro, with its Byzantine-ish domes

and remarkable program of sculpture.

What a wonderful place this would be to explore.