Cáceres Ciudad Monumental: palaces and noble towers: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The conquistadors' palaces and noble towers
Cáceres's noble families built fortified town houses inside the walls, and after the war over the Castilian succession Queen Isabella ordered their towers cut down, which is why the skyline looks as it does. The Americas keep turning up on the way, in the family of an Aztec princess and in the medallions on the bishop's palace.
The stops
For centuries this gently sloping square outside the walls was where Cáceres met, traded and held its fairs. It grew in the 14th century on open ground halfway between the houses around Santiago church and those near the Coria gate, and it moved the town's centre away from the esplanade by Santa María. Some of its buildings still keep 16th-century arcades of low arches on stone piers.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Francisco de Godoy Aldana went with Francisco Pizarro on the conquest of Peru and was one of the conquistadors who came home to Cáceres rich and respected. He married Leonor de Ulloa Ovando, and the couple had this palace built across from Santiago church, outside the medieval walls. Neither saw it finished, and their descendants completed it the following century.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 This square Almohad tower, 25 meters high and built on reused Roman blocks, rises at the edge of the Plaza Mayor. Its name may come from the caliph Abu Yacub Yusuf, or from buhaco, a local word for a straw-and-rag doll, which is what people called the statue that stood on top between 1820 and 1962. That statue, now known as the goddess Ceres, is kept in the Museum of Cáceres, and a replica stands in the Foro de los Balbos.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 The Arch of the Star took the place of the town's 15th-century New Gate, the last gate built into the wall, and Queen Isabella swore to respect the charters of Cáceres here in 1477, as King Ferdinand did in 1479. The present arch dates from 1726, built by Manuel de Lara Churriguera and paid for by Bernardino de Carvajal y Vivero, owner of the Toledo-Moctezuma palace, so that carriages could pass. Inside, a small neoclassical shrine holds a stone figure of Our Lady of the Star, beside a star-shaped lantern.
Photo: Ben Bender — CC BY-SA 3.0 Isabel de Moctezuma, an Aztec princess, married the Cáceres captain Juan Cano de Saavedra, who had gone to the Americas with Hernán Cortés, and a descendant of theirs reworked this palace from the late 16th century. The facade carries the arms of the Toledo, Carvajal and Ulloa families and, after those works gave the upper floor its open brick gallery, those of the Moctezumas too. Inside, the main rooms are decorated with frescoes of Roman emperors, busts of Mexican kings and views of European cities, and the building now houses the Provincial Historical Archive.
Photo: Jesusccastillo — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Philip II lodged in this bishop's palace in 1583, on his way home after being crowned king of Portugal. Its Renaissance doorway, dated 1587, has two medallions of what appear to be a Native American man and woman, a sign of the region's part in the colonization of the Americas, and the arms of Bishop Pedro García de Galarza of Coria above the central window. The palace stands just inside the Arch of the Star, on the left.
Photo: Jesusccastillo — CC BY-SA 3.0 es Santa María is the old town's main church, mostly late Gothic from the 15th and 16th centuries with some Romanesque and Renaissance elements, and its altarpiece is a plateresque work in unpainted wood, carved between 1547 and 1551 by Roque Balduque and Guillén de Ferrant. Against its tower stands a bronze Saint Peter of Alcántara from 1954 by Enrique Pérez Comendador, said to carry the sculptor's own face, whose toes have turned gold from the kisses of the devout. The church became a co-cathedral of the Diocese of Coria-Cáceres in 1957.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Golfín family's house in the lower part of the walled town was built in the 15th and early 16th centuries, Gothic in origin with a plateresque facade topped by a crest of fantastic animals. Above its twin window is the shield of the Catholic Monarchs, and the palace lodged them on both of their visits to the city. It is called de Abajo, the lower one, to tell it from the other branch of the family's palace higher up.
Photo: Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 This is not an old square: it was built between 1963 and 1966 on the site of run-down garages and workshops, as a stop for visitors between the squares of Santa María and San Mateo. It opened on 23 April 1966, the feast of Saint George, patron of Cáceres, whose bronze statue killing the dragon stands in a niche on the stairs. Two plaques in the corner honor the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío and, since 2023, the local builder Antonio Abreu, whose firm restored much of the old town.
Photo: Falk2 — CC BY-SA 4.0 This Gothic house from the end of the 15th century takes its name from its inner courtyard, where a carved monkey is tied by a chain to the staircase handrail, beside a sculpted window with a dark-featured face looking out. Many legends are told about the monkey. The shield over the door, held by two lions, bears the arms of Cáceres, de los Nidos, Andrada and Pizarro, and the house is also known as the Pizarro-Espadero house.
Photo: Jl FilpoC — CC BY-SA 4.0 Isabel de la Cerda and García de Golfín, lord of Casa Corchada, had this fortified house built with a tower at each of its four corners, and three of them remain. The tower at its center escaped being cut down, and the family arms with towers and fleurs-de-lis are still on the facade. In August 1936 General Franco made it his headquarters for 38 days, and a plaque beside the main door records it.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Diego Fernández de Cáceres y Ovando had this house built, and it is known as the palace of the storks for the many that nested on it. Its square, battlemented tower, about 25 meters high, escaped the cutting down of the town's noble towers that Queen Isabella ordered, and in 1480 he was granted the right to raise it. Inside, a courtyard has four galleries of columns and arches, and a staircase that fans out around a Gothic pilaster up to the tower.
Photo: Lancastermerrin88 — CC BY-SA 3.0 The palace stands over the ruins of the Almohad alcázar, and its great survival is the cistern beneath it: an underground hall of five naves of horseshoe arches, with walls more than a meter thick, that stores rainwater from the courtyard above. The city's heritage page ranks it, with the wall, among the most notable remains of the Muslim presence in Cáceres. The palace is named for the weather vanes (veletas) that, by the city's account, once topped its balustrade, and since 1932 it has housed the Museum of Cáceres.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY-SA 4.0 San Mateo stands at the highest point of the walled town, on ground that the city's heritage page says was once held by an Arab mosque and then an earlier Christian church, though historians have never proved the mosque. The present church was begun in the 16th century and mixes Gothic, Renaissance, plateresque and baroque elements; above its plateresque doorway are medallions of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Like the town's other old churches its head points north rather than east, and a local tradition ties that to the Reconquista.
Photo: Lancastermerrin88 — CC BY-SA 3.0
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