Salamanca () is a municipality and city in the autonomous community of Castile and León in Spain, and the capital of the Province of Salamanca. Attached to the comarca of Campo Charro, the city lies on the northern half of the Meseta Central, in the western-central part of the Iberian Peninsula, straddling the Tormes river. Its population in 2024 was 144,458, making Salamanca the 46th-largest municipality in Spain. The University of Salamanca, founded in 1218, is one of the oldest in Western Europe, and the Old City of Salamanca is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which every year attracts a significant number of students and cultural tourists.
The Iron Age hilltop site of on the right bank of the Tormes is considered the first human settlement in the current city. By the 3rd century BC, urban settlement in the nearby Teso de las Catedrales had consolidated under the influence of the Vaccaei and Vettones, regional Celtic tribes. Following Roman subjugation, the indigenous oppidum became the Roman civitas of Salmantica. Little is known of the history of the place after the Migration Period. Christian settlement under the Kingdom of León led by Raymond of Burgundy took hold in the 11th century. The University of Salamanca, founded in 1218, gained widespread recognition in the 16th century for the intellectual production of the so-called School of Salamanca. In addition, the city has also recently developed as a centre for Spanish-language learning.
The is a World Heritage Site, featuring notable examples of plateresque architecture. The Holy Week in Salamanca enjoys the status of Fiesta of International Tourist Interest.
Etymology
The origin of the toponym Salamanca is not clear. Greeks Polybius of Megalopolis and Stephanus called the city , a Greek name that meant "Land of divination" Ptolemy appeals to a polis dominated by the Vacceis with the name of Salmatica or Salmantica. Roman Livy and Plutarch will call it Hermandica and Polyaenus calls it Salmantida or Salmatis. Other historians even call it Selium and Sentica.
On the other hand, some others like Justin and later Rui Méndez or Murillo attributed the creation of the city to Teucer, son of Telamon, king of Salamis, who after being defeated in the Trojan War, came to the Iberian Peninsula and founded a city, which remembering his homeland he would call Salamatica. Another theory is the existence of a god of the first inhabitants — nomadic shepherds and Neolithic farmers — called Helman, whose name derived from the toponym Helmantica.
The philologist Martín S. Ruipérez contributes a new interpretation summarized in that "the first element of Salamanca, is the designation of the ford of a river", " and cannot be linguistically related one from the other" and regarding the second element "where some believe to see the same element in the toponym Talamanca (de Jarama) which, in turn, would coincide in its first element with Talavera, and in Simancas, all of which is undemonstrable".
History
Salamanca in the universal history Salamanca has been linked to Universal History by a series of events and personalities that came to mark the evolution of Western society:
The creation of the first grammar of Spanish language in 1492 by Antonio de Nebrija, the famous Gramática de la lengua castellana. It was the first study of the rules of a Western European language other than Latin and this fact marks the beginning of the Spanish Golden Age. The preparations of Christopher Columbus for his first voyage in the European discovery of the Americas. The Cloister of the University of Salamanca met in council to discuss his project. During these years, Columbus obtained the support of the Dominicans, staying at the Convento de San Esteban. The Salamanca astronomer Abraham Zacuto was his great scientific support for the trip. The years of study of Hernán Cortés before leaving for the Americas and conquering the Aztec Empire. The defense of the rights of the natives of the New World by the School of Salamanca, which, with Francisco de Vitoria at its head, reformulated the concept of natural law, renewed theology, laid the foundations of modern law of nations, international law and modern economic science, and actively participated in the Council of Trent. At this council, mathematicians from the University of Salamanca proposed to Pope Gregory XIII the calendar that came to be known as the Gregorian calendar and is currently used all over the world. The germ was two studies carried out in 1515 and 1578 by scientists at the university, which were submitted to the church. The partial translation of the Bible into Spanish, made by Friar Luis de León. The oldest preserved printed book on modern chess, Repetición de amores y arte de ajedrez, by the religious Luis Ramírez de Lucena, published in Salamanca in 1496. The stay of Miguel de Cervantes, a possible student at the university, which influenced his books: La Cueva de Salamanca, Don Quixote of la Mancha in which he makes references to Salamanca through the character of the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, La tía fingida and El licenciado Vidriera.
Antiquity
The first human habitat in the Salamanca area has been dated to the beginning of the first millennium BC. This is attested by the ceramic remains found in the "San Vicente hill" and which have been ascribed to the Las Cogotas I culture of the Final Bronze Age. In this same hill has been found what to date is considered the first human settlement of stable and continuous character, although already ascribed to the culture of the Soto de Medinilla of the first Iron Age (7th century BC). Later, already in the second Iron Age (from the 4th century BC), it has been found that a new population center developed in the so-called "teso de las catedrales or cerro de San Isidro", this already of Castro character and that lasted until the definitive Romanization of the city. All these settlements, and therefore the current site of Salamanca, owe their existence to the special geomorphological characteristics of the terrain on which they settled. Thus, the choice of the location of these successive settlements must have had a special influence on the fact that this area had three tesserae -formed by the erosion of the San Francisco and Santo Domingo streams-, their corresponding watercourses and especially the proximity of the Tormes River. These details point to the suitability of this territory for the primitive functions of defense and control of the surrounding territory.
The settlement of the hill of San Isidro must have been a city of great importance between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC, not only for its dimensions, but also for its optimal orographic conditions and defensive protection, since it had a wall and moat. In 220 B.C., Hannibal, in his advance through Iberia, besieged and conquered the ancient city of Helmantica (Salamanca). Thus, Plutarch says that "Hannibal besieged it and its inhabitants, to avoid further damage, submitted to him offering them three hundred talents of silver and as many hostages, raising the siege, the Helmantiqueses, failed to keep their promises and protected by their women who had hidden their weapons and managed to defeat Hannibal's troops". However, the Carthaginian general ended up seizing them and, according to Polybius, "admired by the bravery of his women, by them he returned to his men the homeland and wealth".
After the Second Punic War, the victorious Roman army began its expansion throughout most of the Iberian Peninsula. Salamanca began an intense period of Romanization as a city annexed to the province of Lusitania. The Roman Salmantica was restructured, limiting its settlement to the so-called teso de las catedrales, abandoning the site of the hill of San Vicente. Its new configuration kept it as a remarkable city, not only for its particular defensive and accessibility characteristics, but also for being a center of exchange.
Three of the cultural elements that have had the greatest influence on the configuration and development of the city of Salamanca come from the Roman period. In the first place, the Calzada de la Plata, considered as its main communication infrastructure, the main axis of city planning and a milestone in the development of its commercial function. Secondly, the Roman bridge, as an infrastructure that since the 1st century guaranteed the passage over the Tormes river and therefore the access to the city from the south. The Roman bridge still remains today in the northern half, since the other half had to be rebuilt in the 17th century after the San Policarpo flood. Finally, the so-called Cerca Vieja, primitive wall of the city that surrounded the perimeter of the hill of San Isidro or of the cathedrals on the layout of the previous Castro.
In November 2015, in the course of an emergency excavation carried out in the subsoil of a house located in calle Libreros, several fragments of a male marble statue of a togado character were found, which must have been originally located somewhere in the Roman forum of the city of Salmantica, although it must have been later reused as filler material in the place where it was discovered. The statue is exhibited in the Museum of Salamanca and is the first, and to date, the only sculptural find from the Roman period that has appeared in the subsoil of the city. Some specialists consider that this finding, put in relation with several Roman inscriptions from the beginning of the Empire found in the ancient Salmantica, allows to defend the hypothetical juridical promotion of the ancient indigenous oppidum to Roman civitas during the reign of Augustus.
Middle Ages
With the end of the Western Roman Empire, the Alans settled in Lusitania and the city became part of this region. Later the Visigoths conquered the city and annexed it to their territory. There is little information about the development of Salamanca in the Visigothic period, it is only known that in the 4th century the Roman walls were extended with keeps on the same layout, and that the remains of the previous walls were destroyed practically in their entirety. It is known that in 589 the city was an episcopal seat because it was among the cities that sent bishops to the councils of Toledo.
In 712, with the Muslim invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, Musa ibn Nusayr conquered the city. During the Early Middle Ages, the area remained a "no man's land" and most of its population centers were destroyed by the frequent incursions (algaradas) of the Arabs. Salamanca was reduced to an unimportant and almost uninhabited nucleus, although the bridge remained intact, with some settlers in the surrounding area. The successive attempts of the Christian kingdoms to stabilize the area caused many clashes with Muslim expeditions to the north, which caused several skirmishes and battles, such as that of Alfonso I of Asturias in 754, which ended up destroying what was left of the town.
The area remained more or less depopulated until after the important Christian victory, in the Battle of Simancas of 939, the effective repopulation of the riverside area of the Tormes began. According to the Pelagian wording of the Chronicle of Sampiro, two months after the end of the Islamic attack, Ramiro II of León ordered the advance of his army towards the banks of the Tormes, where he says that the repopulation began:
Everything seems to indicate that to the pre-existing population was added during this phase the emigration that came fundamentally from comarcas located to the north of the Duero; in the case of Salamanca it is undoubtedly that it is preferably emigrants arriving from the vicinity of León, according to the donation made by Ordoño III of León in the year 953 to the church of León of all the churches recently constructed in the alfoz of Salamanca.