On the A Ribeira de Baiona promenade we find this statue in honor of King Alfonso IX who freed the town from its servile condition and vassal status to which it was subjected by signing his Puebla letter. The statue was inaugurated in 2001 when the event was eight centenarians. The sculpture made of bronze weighs 2,000 kilos and was made by Juan Oliveira.
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Until 2018 the statue was near fortress but now was translated to the roundabout
Alfonso IX of Leon ( Zamora , Kingdom of Leon , August 15, 1171 1 - Sarria , Kingdom of Leon , September 24, 1230) was the last king of Leon as an independent kingdom, from 1188 until his death in 1230. His son Fernando III of León and Castilla definitively unites the kingdoms of León and Castilla in 1230.
Son of Fernando II and Urraca de Portugal , had difficulties to seize power due to the intrigues of his stepmother Urraca López de Haro , who aspired to enthrone her own son, the Infante Sancho . Throughout his reign he had numerous conflicts and tensions with his cousin Alfonso VIII of Castile . Because of these, was absent from the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa , despite which he made a great activity of recapture, recovering for Christianity the cities of Caceres , in April 1229, Mérida and Badajoz, in the spring of 1230, and in general the entire western half of present-day Extremadura .
He married first Teresa of Portugal , a marriage that was annulled by consanguinity and later with Berenguela de Castilla , from whom he had the infant Fernando . After this marriage was also annulled, Berenguela took his son to his native land and managed to make him king of Castile upon the death of Henry I in 1217. Due to this, father and son distanced themselves and, apparently, Alfonso's hostility IX towards the Castilians led him to leave the kingdom in the hands of Sancha and Dulce, the daughters of his first wife, Teresa of Portugal, instead of those of his first-born. However, Fernando's mother negotiated with Teresa of Portugal the delivery of a life pension to Sancha and Dulce in exchange for their rights and Fernando - who had threatened his stepsisters with attacking the kingdom if his demands were not met - succeeded his father as King of León, uniting both crowns with the so-called Concordia de Benavente.
When his father died in January 1188, Alfonso IX, who was then seventeen years old, found enormous difficulties in accessing a throne that belonged to him by birthright. On the one hand, there was his stepmother Urraca López de Haro , who wanted to eliminate him, since she wanted her son Sancho to be the one to inherit the kingdom, despite being born later. Urraca argued that Alfonso IX had no right to the throne because the marriage between his parents had been annulled. To this was added the desire of the neighboring kingdoms of Portugal and Castile to divide the Kingdom of León.. However, everything was resolved in favor of Alfonso IX, because Urraca did not get support for his goals among the Leonese.
The beginning of the reign was extremely complicated as the Portuguese and Castilians coveted the lands of the Kingdom of León to the east and west, while the Almohads posed great danger to the south. As if foreign threats were not enough, the new monarch found that the kingdom was bankrupt due to the policy that his father had carried out during his reign. With this situation, the monarch, who was barely seventeen years old, summoned the famous Cortes de León in 1188 in which the representatives of the cities were summoned for the first time to intervene in State affairs. Representatives of the nobility, clergy and popular classes from León, Galicia, Asturias and Extremadura attended, thus being the first representative courts of Europe and the world.
The early death of the infant Fernando, son of Alfonso IX with Queen Teresa, disrupted the plans of the Leonese monarch. Alfonso IX, who had been married twice, had two sons. The first dead, there was another, also called Fernando, who had had with Queen Berenguela. His appointment as King of Castile changed things again.
After that, Alfonso IX thought of his daughters, the infantas Sancha and Dulce, born from his first marriage to Queen Teresa. Thus, it seems that he intended to make depositaries to his widow and his daughters Sancha and Dulce of the rights of the kingdom, as deduced from documents after 1217. The Order of Santiago, created by the monarchs of Leon. In 1218, however, the pope confirmed Ferdinand III as heir to the kingdom. 18However, Fernando III claimed the rights he claimed to have due to his status as the son of the previous marriage. While the infantas were received as sovereigns in Zamora, Fernando entered Toro, with the support of the Leonese episcopate; finally he agreed a large sum with his sisters to renounce their possible rights in the so-called " Concordia de Benavente " (December 11, 1230), which ended the succession conflict. In return, they recognized the right of Fernando to the leonine throne.
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