Urueña is a municipality and town Spanish in the province of Valladolid , in the community of Castilla y León .
It has one of the best preserved urban centers in the province of Valladolid, offering its visitor the appearance of a small medieval city. For this reason it was declared a Historic-Artistic Site in 1975 . It conserves a large part of the wall with two of its doors, some canvases of the castle, stone houses of a certain quality and the Gothic - Renaissance parish church of Santa María del Azogue. It houses the “Joaquín Díaz” ethnographic center , the Luis Delgado museuminstruments of the world, the Mercedes Rueda exhibition hall and the Bell Museum. In 1975 Urueña and its hermitage of La Anunciada was declared a Historic-Artistic Site, and since 2007 it is the first Villa del Libro in Spain, which is why it is included in the network of Villa del Libro del mundo. On January 1, 2014 it became one of " The most beautiful towns in Spain " and since then the number of visitors has not stopped growing, in 2017 it was visited by 21,000 people.
From many places in its urban area, good views of its surrounding territory can be obtained, which has turned Urueña into an unquestionable viewpoint of the landscape of Tierra de Campos . Outside the town center, the presence of the traditional dovecotes and the shrine hermitage of Nuestra Señora de la Anunciada stands out , one of the best examples of Romanesque art on the Castilian plateau. The invocation of the Virgin Announced is of great tradition in this town, celebrating its patron saint festivities on March 25 and the pilgrimage on September 8.
he history of this town takes us back to the first Vaccinia settlements , it was Romanized at the beginning of our era and Christianized around the 10th century . He was head of Infantado de Valladolid in the 12th to 14th centuries .
The place where the town is located, strategically dominating the valley, was very attractive for the first settlements. It is believed that its place-name is a voice inherited from its first inhabitants, the Vacceans : Ur-Uru (water area) and Anna-Eneas (sister). On the slope of the hill where the town sits, there has been a spring of clean water since ancient times, from which the population was supplied over the centuries. In the middle of the 20th century , a fountain was built inside the town with the supply of water from said spring, to facilitate the provision of supplies to the neighbors.
The Romans came to these lands around 1 BC. C. By the term passed a route connecting between Palencia and Zamora , the route of Toro, where carriage tracks and bridge are.
In the Middle Ages , with King Sancho II of Castile (Sancho el Fuerte), the town was head of the Infantado de Valladolid . His sister Doña Urraca took care of and inhabited the fiefdom. Later, Alfonso VII granted his sister Sancha Raimúndez the Infantado de Valladolid, with the dominium of the towns of Medina de Rioseco , Castromonte and Urueña, all three on the border of the kingdoms of León and Castilla, which in the reign of this king were united. In 1157 Alfonso VII died, dividing the kingdoms again: Leon left his son Ferdinand II and Castile to his other sonSancho III el Deseado , who was the one who fortified the Plaza de Urueña in view of the new division. Sancho III reigned for only one year, Alfonso VIII of Castile succeeded him , who was only a child, but the Infantado de Valladolid passed to the jurisdiction of Fernando II of León who, feeling harmed by the will of Alfonso VII, took advantage of the minority of Alfonso VIII to seize these lands. When Alfonso VIII came of age, he made war against Fernando II, forcing a peace treaty in Medina de Rioseco, which restored the borders between the two kingdoms as Alfonso VII had left in his will. After this treaty, the quarrels between the two monarchs returned, and they had to make another peace treaty, the so-called Fresno-Lavandera Treaty, which lists the places that should belong to each kingdom, leaving Urueña within the kingdom of Castile. During the following reigns, the town of Urueña would remain as a crucial border point between the two kingdoms.
In the 15th century , King Juan II donated the town to Don Pedro Girón, butler and favorite of the prince and future King Enrique IV .
In 1876 , the town suffered a terrible fire that destroyed half the town. The City Council was totally devastated and with it all the archives. Recently, in the last years of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st , the town has undergone a great change in its appearance, structure and quality of life. The streets are paved, the houses and some palace rebuilt and the castle, which serves as a cemetery, is being restored and landscaped in 2005 . It also has a very interesting cultural life, thanks to the different museums that have been opened under the most important of all, which is the Ethnological Museum, run by its creator Joaquín Díaz and located in a reconstructed house of the16th century .
Monuments and places of interest
Its streets and its restored and refurbished houses offer an aspect of a small medieval town. It preserves a large part of the wall with two of its doors, some canvases of the castle, stone houses of a certain quality and a Gothic - Renaissance parish church . It also has four very interesting museums. Outside the walled enclosure and a short distance away is the Romanesque hermitage of La Anunciada and the ruins of an old monastery. Prehistoric remains have been found in the municipal area.
Its streets are of medieval layout, with some stone masonry houses, rebuilt and most of adobe . The house known as de la Mayorazga (or simply the Casona) has been recovered and converted into the ethnographic museum of Joaquín Díaz.
Currently, Urueña is the only existing Villa del Libro in Spain .
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