Spain's Best-Kept Secret — Extremadura's UNESCO medieval city where Roman walls, Moorish towers, and 15th-century palaces of conquistador-enriched families crowd a perfectly intact old town, with no cruise ships and no tour groups
Cáceres is the finest medieval city in Spain that most visitors have never heard of. Its UNESCO World Heritage Old City (declared 1986) is one of the best-preserved examples of late medieval urban architecture in Europe — Roman walls, Moorish towers (aljibes), and the extraordinary palaces and mansions built by the returning conquistadors who used New World gold to construct Renaissance monuments in their home city. The Cáceres nobility had deep connections to the Spanish conquest: Diego García de Paredes ('the Samson of Extremadura'), Hernando de Ovando (cousin of Nicolás de Ovando, the firs…
Norba Caesarina was a Roman colony founded in 35 BCE — its walls (still partly standing) were built in the 1st century CE. The city was taken by the Moors in 711 and flourished as Qazris, an agricultural and fortress city, until reconquest by Alfonso IX of León in 1229 on the feast of San Jorge (23 April) — still celebrated as the city's patron festival. The Reconquista nobility who received the city built towers and urban palaces in the 14th–15th centuries; the Catholic Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella) ordered the tops of the tower-houses reduced to curb the power of factional violence betw…