Plaza Mayor

The enclosure that today occupies the Plaza Mayor emerged as a market square in the Late Middle Ages, an area of ​​merchants, trades and festivities.

After the fire that devastated the city center in 1561, its reconstruction began, promoted by Philip II, becoming the first regular main square in Spain, closed and with arcades, a model taken by others such as Madrid.

The square housed one of the darkest episodes in the history of the city: the autos de fe of the Inquisition of 1559, turned into mass spectacles, and in which Saint Francisco de Borja intervened giving spiritual assistance to some defendants. Philip II and his sister Joan de Austria (at that time a secret Jesuit, under the pseudonym of Mateo Sánchez) were present in the cars that followed.