Jerez de la Frontera: Alcázar, flamenco barrios and sherry: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
The Alcázar, the cathedral, the bodegas and the flamenco barrios
The walk loops through the old town: a main square for knights' duels, the San Miguel quarter, which began as a suburb outside the walls, a Renaissance council house, parishes founded after 1264, a palace that now holds the flamenco documentation centre, the Santiago quarter, the other suburb known for flamenco, and palaces built by rival noble families.
The stops
This former Moorish fortress and palace at the southern end of the old walls was built up by the Almohads in the 12th century, and it is one of the few structures that best show Almohad architecture in the Iberian Peninsula. Inside is a mosque, the only one left of the 18 the city once had, which Alfonso X turned into a church to the Virgin Mary after the Christian conquest, its minaret becoming a bell tower. In 1926 the industrialist Salvador Díez Pérez de Muñoz bought the Alcázar after learning that the council planned to demolish it and build a public park on the site.
Photo: PEPE GADEIRAS — CC BY-SA 4.0 The name comes from the Latin arenarium, a place of combat: after the Reconquista this open ground by the Alcázar became the stage for duels and tournaments, among them a hard three-day fight in 1343 between Ruy Páez de Biedma and Payo Rodrigues Dávila. From 1593 all public games and spectacles in Jerez were ordered to be held here and nowhere else. Today it is the city's main square, with a clock-lamp of 1856 by José Rodríguez Losada and, at its centre, an equestrian monument to Miguel Primo de Rivera by Mariano Benlliure, raised in 1928, taken down and put back when the square was remodelled, which stirred some controversy.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 Work on this church began in the late 15th century; a plaque at the door of the Gothic side façade is dated 1484, and building went on for centuries, so it mixes late Gothic with Renaissance and Baroque. Its tower-façade, raised between 1672 and 1701 by the local architect Diego Moreno Meléndez, ends in a spire covered in blue and white tiles, and the tower is the highest point in the city. The church gives its name to the San Miguel quarter, which began as a suburb outside the walls in the 14th century and, like Santiago, has a long flamenco tradition: Lola Flores was born on Calle del Sol and La Paquera on Calle Cerro Fuerte.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0 The city's master builders Andrés de Ribera, Diego Martín de Oliva and Bartolomé Sánchez put up this council house in 1575, in the reign of Philip II, and their names are carved on the lintel and side pediments. Beside the main block runs a loggia of three round arches on slim white marble columns, and the façade carries figures of the four Virtues and statues of Hercules and Julius Caesar. It was the seat of the city's civil power from the Reconquista until 1873, after which it served among other things as the municipal library.
Photo: Benjamin Smith — CC BY-SA 4.0 Alfonso X founded this parish in the name of Dionysius the Areopagite because the city passed to Christian rule on Saint Denis's Day in 1264, and the saint became its patron. The church that stands today is Gothic-Mudéjar work of the 15th century, and its pillars are adorned with Almohad decoration. Attached to it is the Torre de la Atalaya, also of the 15th century, a civilian watchtower for fires and attacks that also held the town's clock, installed in 1454.
Photo: Almicar — CC BY-SA 4.0 San Marcos is one of the six parishes created inside the walls in the 13th century after Alfonso X took the city in 1264, and with San Lucas, San Mateo and San Juan de los Caballeros it is counted among the four Evangelist churches. The present building is dated to about the middle of the 14th century, and a deep late Gothic rebuilding around 1480 gave it one wide nave under a star vault. The assemblies held here under the Duke of Medina Sidonia were meant to end the quarrels among the nobility of Jerez.
Photo: Jerezplataforma — CC BY 3.0 This palace on the Plaza de San Juan dates from the 15th century and was remodelled in the 18th and 20th centuries; its first owners were Alvar López de Hinojosa and his wife Isabel Melgarejo. It keeps a Mudéjar wooden ceiling described as unique in the city and a columned patio with stone metopes of eagles and snakes. It is now the home of the Centro Andaluz de Flamenco, an institution created in 1987 and part of the Junta de Andalucía's culture department since 1993, described as the largest flamenco documentation centre in the world, with almost 15,000 recordings and a library of more than 5,500 volumes.
Photo: Jerezplataforma — CC BY 3.0 This bronze statue on Calle Ancha, unveiled on 27 April 1991, stands on a fountain facing a stretch of the old city wall. It shows the explorer, who was born in Jerez around 1490, pushing through undergrowth with only a helmet and an axe, with four Indigenous figures as a backdrop. The plaque calls him explorer of Florida and Adelantado of the Río de la Plata; he was one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition and spent eight years crossing what is now the American Southwest before reaching Mexico in 1536.
Photo: El Pantera — CC BY-SA 4.0 This Gothic church began as two small hermitages built outside the walls after Alfonso X took Jerez in 1264; the present church was started in the late 15th century, and the shield of the Catholic Monarchs on the main portal marks the period. Its tower dates from 1663 and its bell gable from 1760, and a restoration between 2005 and 2016 kept it closed to worship for eleven years. It stands at the heart of the Santiago quarter, which grew outside the old city gate and is described as the cradle of many flamenco artists, among them José Mercé, La Macanita and Tío José de Paula.
Photo: Fedoce1 — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Riquelme family built this house on the Plaza del Mercado, the noble centre of medieval Jerez, in a more modern Renaissance style than the houses of rival families such as the Ponce de León and the Villavicencio. The façade of 1542, by Fernando Álvarez, was inspired by Seville's Renaissance town hall, and its portal carries two reliefs of Hercules, medallions of Constantine, Romulus and Remus, and the family's coat of arms. The columns at the outer corners, with simplified Corinthian capitals, are a Jerez touch credited to the Genoese merchants who traded here.
Photo: Jerezplataforma — CC BY 3.0 Tradition says that Alfonso X gave the site to a noble knight of Jerez who had helped him in the conquest. A headstone in the doorway dates the house to 1545, built by Pedro Benavente Cabeza de Vaca y Carvajal on the remains of an Islamic building, and the present façade, of mixed Renaissance and Neoclassical style, was built in 1785 by José Vargas y Sánchez.
Photo: Jerezplataforma — CC BY 3.0 This collegiate church was raised to a cathedral by Pope John Paul II on 3 March 1980. The present building was begun on 9 May 1695 and blessed in full on 6 December 1778; of the church before it only the tower survives, probably built on the minaret of the city's old main mosque. In that tower hang the great bell La Gorda, cast in 1566, and a wooden rattle, the matraca, sounded only between Holy Thursday and Holy Saturday, when church bells were traditionally silent, and unique in Spain by its design.
Photo: PEPE GADEIRAS — CC BY-SA 4.0 González Byass dates its origins to 1835, and its Tío Pepe solera was set up in 1844 and, the Spanish page says, has never been interrupted since. The fino is named for the founder's uncle, and the bottle in a short jacket and wide-brimmed hat with a guitar became the brand's image in 1935. The great Tío Pepe bodega was designed by Eduardo Torroja and built in the early 1960s, a complex so large that it takes in streets that were once public.
Photo: El Pantera — CC BY-SA 4.0
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