Imperial Toledo: Zocodover to El Greco: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Imperial Toledo: the Alcázar, the cathedral and El Greco
After the Revolt of the Comuneros, Charles V's court was installed in Toledo, and he chose the city as his residence at least 15 times from 1525 on. Architects such as Alonso de Covarrubias and Juan de Herrera shaped its buildings; the court moved to Madrid in 1561, and El Greco settled in Toledo in the 1570s, where his son Jorge Manuel later worked on the cathedral and the town hall.
The stops
The name Zocodover comes from the Arabic sūq ad-dawābb, "market of burden beasts", and for most of Toledo's history this was the city's central hub. In 1502 the city proposed widening the square to join it to the front of the Alcázar, and Queen Isabella approved, but the 23-metre slope between them made the work extremely difficult and it was never carried out. After a fire destroyed the old square on 29 October 1589 the decision was taken to build a new one, and part of the square was designed by Juan de Herrera in the reign of Philip II.
Photo: Lourdes Cardenal — CC BY-SA 3.0 Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza, archbishop of Toledo from 1482 to 1495, founded the Hospital de Santa Cruz to bring together the city's help for orphaned and abandoned children. Alonso de Covarrubias made its Plateresque portal, and the building is described as a standout example of civilian Renaissance architecture in Spain. It has housed the provincial museum since 1919, and among its collections are works that El Greco painted in Toledo.
Photo: D.Rovchak — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Alcázar stands on the highest ground in Toledo. Charles V called the Cortes to Toledo in 1525 and lodged here, and the fortress was reworked in his time as a compact palace round a two-tiered arcaded courtyard, with the north façade by Alonso de Covarrubias, the south by Juan de Herrera and a huge imperial coat of arms over the door. Most of the building was rebuilt between 1939 and 1957 after the siege of the Alcázar in the Spanish Civil War, and today it holds the Army Museum and the Castilla-La Mancha library.
Photo: King of Hearts — CC BY-SA 4.0 Work on the cathedral began in 1226 under Ferdinand III, and the vaults of the central nave were finished in 1493. The 16th century was Toledo's golden age, when the city came to be called the Imperial City and its archbishop-governors looked after it while the kings were away; the choir by Alonso Berruguete and Felipe Vigarny belongs to Cardinal Tavera's time. The dome of the Mozarabic Chapel was designed in the 17th century by El Greco's son, Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli, and services in the Mozarabic rite are still held there.
Photo: Querubin Saldaña — CC BY-SA 3.0 The town hall was planned in relation to the cathedral, with the square between them joining the two buildings. Works began in 1575 on a design by Juan de Herrera, whose original plan can still be glimpsed in the façade despite the later changes, among them those of Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli, El Greco's son, who took over the building and in 1612 drew up the slate spires that close the towers. After works stopped, the architect Teodoro Ardemans took them up again in 1690 and finished the building in 1703.
Photo: Fernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 This Cistercian convent is believed to go back to the 6th century, and its church was rebuilt in the second half of the 16th century, begun by Nicolás de Vergara and completed by the royal architect Juan de Herrera. El Greco settled in Toledo in the 1570s, and with the help of his patron Diego de Castilla one of his first commissions in the city was to paint altarpieces for this church. The main altar now holds a replica of the largest, The Assumption of the Virgin, whose original is in Chicago, and decades later he painted The Adoration of the Shepherds, now in the Prado, to hang above his own tomb.
Photo: Jvallmitja — CC BY-SA 4.0 Cardinal Juan Martínez Silíceo, archbishop of Toledo, founded this school for girls in 1551, with King Philip II as its patron beside the archbishop. Its aim was to educate young women to be good mothers, and money was set aside for the dowries of former pupils. The portals of the façade are Baroque classicist, one with the royal shield and the other with the cardinal's arms, and since 1990 the building has been a university residence.
Photo: Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador — CC BY-SA 2.0 Santo Tomé is first recorded in the 12th century on the site of an 11th-century mosque, and in the early 14th century Gonzalo Ruiz de Toledo, Lord of Orgaz, had it rebuilt, turning the old minaret into a Mudéjar bell tower. Its fame rests on The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which El Greco made in 1584 for the parish priest Andrés Núñez de Toledo. The painting shows a legend in which Saint Stephen and Saint Augustine came down to lay the Lord of Orgaz in his tomb.
Photo: D.Rovchak — CC BY-SA 4.0 A Count of Fuensalida had this Mudéjar palace built in the 15th century. While the Alcázar was being rebuilt it housed Charles V and the court of his wife, Empress Isabel of Portugal, who died here in 1539, and her funeral procession set out from the palace for Granada. A statue of Isabel by Pompeo Leoni presides over the courtyard, and a literary academy that met in the palace from 1580 to 1603 counted among its members a man listed only as the Painter, whom Spanish Wikipedia identifies as El Greco.
Photo: Jl FilpoC — CC BY 4.0 El Greco, Domenikos Theotokopoulos (1541-1614), spent much of his life in Toledo. The museum, first opened in 1911 in the Jewish Quarter, joins a 16th-century house with a courtyard to an early 20th-century museum building; the house recreates the painter's home, which no longer exists. It holds many of his late works, among them the Apostolado, a series of thirteen paintings of Christ and his disciples made between 1610 and 1614 for the Hospital de Santiago.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0
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