About The Area:
Burgos, the capital of this northernwestern region of Spain, boasts around 170,000 inhabitants. Founded in the 9th century, but retaining its Visigothic name signifying consolidated walled villages (burgos), the city was the seat of a Catholic bishop from the 10th century and became in the 11th century the capital of the kingdom of Castile. Burgos was a major stop for pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela.
Burgos had been a Celtiberian city, part of the Roman province of Hispania Citerior and then of Hispania Tarraconensis. The Visigoths drove back the Suevi, then after a brief Moorish occupation, Alfonso III the Great, king of Leon reconquered it in the mid 9th century. Diego Rodriguez "Porcelos", Count of Castile, gathered the inhabitants of the surrounding country into one fortified village, which took the name of Burgos.
In 1574 Pope Gregory XIII made its bishop an archbishop. At the request of Philip II, Burgos still possesses more ecclesiastical monuments than any other Spanish city, surpassing even Toledo. The three most outstanding examples are the cathedral, with its chapel of the Condestable, the monastery of Las Huelgas and the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores.
Burgos has been the scene of many wars: with the Moors, the struggles between Leon and Navarre, and between Castile and Aragon. In the Peninsular War against Napoleonic France, Burgos was the scene of a battle, and again in the 19th century during the Carlist civil wars of the Spanish succession. During the Spanish Civil War Burgos was the base of General Franco's rebel Nationalist government.
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