Tudela | |
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Coordinates: 42°03′55″N1°36′24″W / 42.06528°N 1.60667°W | |
Country | Spain |
Autonomous community | Navarre |
Government | |
• Mayor | Alejandro Toquero Gil (Navarra Suma) |
Area | |
• Total | 215.7 km2 (83.3 sq mi) |
Elevation | 264 m (866 ft) |
Population (2018) [1] | |
• Total | 35,593 |
• Density | 170/km2 (430/sq mi) |
Demonym | Tudelanos |
Time zone | UTC+1 (CET) |
• Summer (DST) | UTC+2 (CEST) |
Postal code | 31500 |
Website | www |
Tudela is a municipality in Spain, the second largest city of the autonomous community of Navarre and twice a former Latin bishopric. Its population is around 35,000. The city is sited in the Ebro valley. Fast trains running on two-track electrified railways serve the city and two freeways (AP 68 and AP 15) join close to it. Tudela is the capital of the agricultural region of Ribera Navarra, and also the seat of the courts of its judicial district.
The poet Al-Tutili, the 12th-century traveler Benjamin of Tudela, the 13th century writer William of Tudela and the physician and theologian Michael de Villanueva were from the city. The city hosts an annual festival in honor of Santa Ana (mother of the Virgin Mary) which begins on 24 July at noon and continues for approximately a week. Street music, bullfights and the running of the bulls are typical events of the festival.
Archeological excavations have shown that the area of Tudela has been populated since the Lower Paleolithic era. The town of Tudela was founded by the Romans on Celt-Iberian settlements. Since then the town has been inhabited continuously. The Roman poet Marcus Valerius Martialis (Epigrams Book IV, 55) "recalls in grateful verse" the town of Tutela compared to his native Bilbilis. The city was later taken by the Arabs during the Umayyad conquest of Hispania and became the Muslim emirate of Al-Hakam I in 802 under Amrus ibn Yusuf al-Muwalad.
At the beginning of the 9th century, the strategic importance of Tudela as a site on the river Ebro was enhanced by historical and political circumstances. It became the base of the Muwallad Banu Qasi family, local magnates converted to Islam that managed to stay independent of the emirs, establishing an on-off alliance and close ties with the Kings of Pamplona over the next century. With the power of the Banu Qasi fading at the onset of the 10th century, the town fell under the influence of the rising Caliphate of Córdoba and had to come up against a more aggressive policy on the part of the new dynasty ruling in Pamplona, the Ximenes, who had set up close ties with their neighbouring Christian kingdoms.
The town was used by Muslims as a bridgehead to fight against the expanding Kingdom of Navarre. When Christians under Alfonso the Battler conquered Tudela in 1119, three different religious communities were living there:
In the aftermath of the conquest, community relations appear to have been strained and Muslims were forced to live in a suburb outside the town walls, whereas Jews continued to reside inside the walls. The co-existence of different cultures is reflected in Tudela's reputation for producing important medieval writers such as Al-Tutili. In 1157 the English scholar Robert of Ketton, first translator of the Koran to a Western tongue (Latin), became a canon of Tudela.
The Jews were banished in 1498 (the expulsion from Navarre occurring slightly later than in the Iberian kingdoms. Muslims and Moriscos were expelled in 1516 and 1610 respectively. There are still examples of Islamic-influenced architecture in the city - the style the Spanish call Mudéjar; but the principal mosque was handed over to the Catholic Church in 1121, and by the end of the 12th century construction of the (future) cathedral of Our Lady of Solitude had begun.
Later Tudela became an important defensive point for the Kingdom of Navarre in battles with Castile and Aragon. Tudela was an Agramont party stronghold and actually the last Navarrese one to surrender to Ferdinand II of Aragon's Aragonese troops in the initial 1512 Spanish invasion of Navarre, only doing so to avoid futile bloodshed, Spanish pillaging and further confiscations to town dwellers, after the Navarrese king failed to send a relief force.
At the end of the 17th century, a new public square was built, called Plaza Nueva or Plaza de los Fueros, which became the main city square. In 1783 the Diocese of Tudela was created, split off from Pamplona.
On 23 November 1808, Napoleon Bonaparte's Marshal Lannes won the Battle of Tudela in the Peninsular War. The train station was built in 1861, which, together with the agricultural revolution, resulted in a new period of expansion for the city. The bishopric was merged back into 'Pamplona-Tudela' in 1851, restored in 1889 and ultimately suppressed in 1984.
The Casa Salinas bakery in Tudela, known for its excellent mantecadas, closed in January 2011 after 138 years in business. [2] Another traditional dessert is manjar blanco. [3]
The Days of Exaltation and Festivals of the Vegetable are celebrated in the Navarra de Tudela locality during ten days, generally in the first fortnight of May or from the end of April. Although the central acts are developed in those ten days, before and after there are acts related to the days. In 2019 they will be from April 12 to May 5. Its origin is in the "Week of the Vegetable" that began to be organized in the 80s. In the current format it has been developed since 1994 (this year the twentieth edition is celebrated). They were declared Fiestas of National Tourist Interest in the year 2011. There are hundreds of events that take place before, during and after the Days of Exaltation and Festivals of the Vegetable since Tudela and its fertile orchard allow to enjoy different seasonal products. From the firing of the announcing rocket until the last day of celebration are hundreds of acts that can be enjoyed: from gastronomic routes with pinchos and menus where the vegetable is the protagonist until popular dinners, contests of stews with vegetables, workshops, talks and even a tweeter encounter called "vegetables & tweets". The main events are the weekend with the "General Chapter of the Order of Volatín" which includes the proclamation of the festivities, the appointment of the Knight of Honor and the Prize Exaltation of the Vegetable.
All these acts are completed with the Great Concert of the Days of the Vegetables where a renowned musical group animates the Saturday night.
The town is served by the Tudela de Navarra railway station on the Casetas–Bilbao railway.
Robert of Ketton, known in Latin as Rodbertus Ketenensis, was an English astronomer, translator, priest and diplomat active in Spain. He translated several works of Arabic into Latin, including the first translation of the Quran into any Western language. Between 1144 and 1157 he held an archdeaconry in the diocese of Pamplona. In the past he has been confounded with Robert of Chester, another English translator active in Spain in the mid-twelfth century; and at least one modern scholar believes they are the same person.
Navarre, officially the Chartered Community of Navarre, is a landlocked foral autonomous community and province in northern Spain, bordering the Basque Autonomous Community, La Rioja, and Aragon in Spain and Nouvelle-Aquitaine in France. The capital city is Pamplona. The present-day province makes up the majority of the territory of the medieval Kingdom of Navarre, a long-standing Pyrenean kingdom that occupied lands on both sides of the western Pyrenees, with its northernmost part, Lower Navarre, located in the southwest corner of France.
Pamplona is the capital city of the Chartered Community of Navarre, in Spain.
The Kingdom of Navarre, originally the Kingdom of Pamplona, was a Basque kingdom that occupied lands on both sides of the western Pyrenees, with its northernmost areas originally reaching the Atlantic Ocean, between present-day Spain and France.
The Public University of Navarre, also known by its acronym UPNA or NUP, is a public university created in 1987 by the government of the Spanish autonomous region of Navarre. It has three campuses located in Pamplona and Tudela. Its activity began in 1989.
The Banu Qasi, Banu Kasi, Beni Casi, Banu Musa, or al-Qasawi were a Muladí dynasty that in the 9th century ruled the Upper March, a frontier territory of the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba, located on the upper Ebro Valley. At their height in the 850s, family head Musa ibn Musa al-Qasawi was so powerful and autonomous that he would be called 'The Third Monarch of Hispania'. In the first half of the 10th century, an intra-family succession squabble, rebellions and rivalries with competing families, in the face of vigorous monarchs to the north and south, led to the sequential loss of all of their land.
Benjamin of Tudela, also known as Benjamin ben Jonah, was a medieval Jewish traveler who visited Europe, Asia, and Africa in the twelfth century. His vivid descriptions of western Asia preceded those of Marco Polo by a hundred years. With his broad education and vast knowledge of languages, Benjamin of Tudela is a major figure in medieval geography and Jewish history.
Íñigo Arista was a Basque chieftain and the first king of Pamplona. He is thought to have risen to prominence after the defeat of local Frankish partisans at the Battle of Pancorbo in 816, and his rule is usually dated from shortly after the defeat of a Carolingian army in 824.
Labastida in Spanish or Bastida in Basque is a town and municipality of the Rioja Alavesa, in the province of Álava in the Basque Country, northern Spain. It is located between the River Ebro and the Sierra de Toloño mountain range, 4 km east of the city of Haro and 30 km south of the Basque capital Vitoria-Gasteiz.
San Adrián is a town and municipality located in the province and autonomous community of Navarre, northern Spain. There was an ancient monastery dedicated to San Adrián y la Virgen de la Palma there, after which the village is named.
The Jiménez dynasty, alternatively called the Jimena, the Sancha, the Banu Sancho, the Abarca or the Banu Abarca, was a medieval ruling family which, beginning in the 9th century, eventually grew to control the royal houses of several kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula during the 11th and 12th centuries, namely the Kingdoms of Navarre, Aragon, Castile, León and Galicia as well as of other territories in the South of France. The family played a major role in the Reconquista, expanding the territory under the direct control of the Christian states as well as subjecting neighboring Muslim taifas to vassalage. Each of the Jiménez royal lines ultimately went extinct in the male line in the 12th or 13th century.
The Duchy of Gascony or Duchy of Vasconia was a duchy located in present-day southwestern France and northeastern Spain, an area encompassing the modern region of Gascony. The Duchy of Gascony, then known as Wasconia, was originally a Frankish march formed to hold sway over the Basques. However, the duchy went through different periods, from its early years with its distinctively Basque element to the merger in personal union with the Duchy of Aquitaine to the later period as a dependency of the Plantagenet kings of England.
La Rioja is an autonomous community and province in Spain, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula. Its capital is Logroño. Other cities and towns in the province include Calahorra, Arnedo, Alfaro, Haro, Santo Domingo de la Calzada, and Nájera. It has an estimated population of 315,675 inhabitants, making it the least populated autonomous community of Spain.
Fortún Ochoiz or Fortún Ochoa was a Navarrese nobleman, diplomat, and statesman. Throughout his known career he held the tenencia of La Rioja, an important marcher lordship, the rump of the Kingdom of Viguera, and the foundation for the Lordship of Los Cameros. Fortún helped fix the border between southwestern Navarre and the Kingdom of Castile, and he married into the royal family and fought alongside his father-in-law, García Sánchez III in the Reconquista. His ancestors may have belonged to the Banu Qasi, themselves descended from Visigothic nobility, and his descendants continued to rule their patrimony until the twelfth century.
Navarro-Aragonese was a Romance language once spoken in a large part of the Ebro River basin, south of the middle Pyrenees; the dialects of the modern Aragonese language, spoken in a small portion of that territory, can be seen as its last remaining forms. The areas where Navarro-Aragonese was spoken might have included most of Aragon, southern Navarre, and La Rioja. It was also spoken across several towns of central Navarre in a multilingual environment with Occitan, where Basque was the native language.
The history of the Jews in Tudela, Spain goes back well over one thousand years.
The Cathedral of Saint Mary of Tudela is a Roman Catholic cathedral located in Plaza Vieja in the center of Tudela, autonomous community of Navarre, Spain. The medieval building was originally a collegiate church. It became a cathedral with the creation of the Diocese of Tudela, which existed 1783-1851 and again 1889-1956. It is now a co-cathedral in the Archdiocese of Pamplona and Tudela.
The Upper March was an administrative and military division in northeast Al-Andalus, roughly corresponding to the Ebro valley and adjacent Mediterranean coast, from the 8th century to the early 11th century. It was established as a frontier province, or march, of the Emirate, later Caliphate of Córdoba, facing the Christian lands of the Carolingian Empire's Marca Hispanica, the Asturo-Leonese marches of Castile and Álava, and the nascent autonomous Pyrenean principalities. In 1018, the decline of the central Cordoban state allowed the lords of the Upper March to establish in its place the Taifa of Zaragoza.
The History of Pamplona as a city goes back to the 1st millennium B.C. when a settlement of Vascones named Iruña existed. However, the traces of human occupation of the area date back 75,000 years. In the Roman era, the Vascones settlement was converted into a Roman city by General Pompey, who began by setting up a military camp there in 74 B.C. which he named Pompelo.