The History of Toledo

Toledo has been the capital of a kingdom and the northern frontier of a caliphate. It has been the primatial see of Spain, and for a few decades in the sixteenth century the effective capital of an empire. Then the court left for Madrid in 1561 and the city stopped changing. That is why it looks the way it does.

Roman Toletum, from 193 BC

The Romans took the hill in 193 BC and made it a municipium. The site recommended itself for the reason it still does. It is a granite outcrop inside a deep loop of the Tagus, defensible on three sides and needing walls on only one. Roman Toletum left baths, a circus and a water supply. Fragments of all three survive under the modern street level, and one guided walk here is let into the excavated baths beneath the Plaza de Amador de los Ríos.

The Visigothic capital, 542–711

When the Visigoths moved their court here in the sixth century, Toledo became the capital of a kingdom covering most of the Iberian peninsula. Eighteen church councils met here between 400 and 702. The third of them, in 589, converted the kingdom from Arianism to Catholicism, and that decision shaped Spanish Christianity for the following millennium. UNESCO's citation names the Visigothic capital as one of the four phases that justify the listing.

Under the Emirate, 711–1085

Toledo fell to the Umayyad conquest in 711 and spent the next three and a half centuries as a frontier city of the Emirate and then the Caliphate of Córdoba. It rebelled often enough to earn a reputation for it. When the Caliphate broke apart in the eleventh century, Toledo became the capital of an independent taifa kingdom. The horseshoe arch, the brickwork and the carved plaster still visible across the city all descend from that period. The Mosque of Cristo de la Luz, built in 999, survives from it almost intact.

1085: Alfonso VI takes the city

Alfonso VI of León and Castile took Toledo in 1085 without a siege, under terms that allowed the Muslim and Jewish populations to remain. What followed is the reason the city is called the city of three cultures. For roughly four hundred years, Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities lived in the same walls and built for one another. Santa María la Blanca is the clearest evidence — a synagogue raised by Muslim craftsmen under Christian rule, later turned into a church.

The School of Translators, twelfth and thirteenth centuries

Toledo's scholars translated Arabic and Hebrew works into Latin and Castilian. In doing so they handed medieval Europe much of what it knew of Greek philosophy, medicine, astronomy and mathematics. Aristotle reached the universities of Paris and Oxford largely through Toledo. Alfonso X, king from 1252 to 1284, gathered the translators into a working establishment. He also had the results written in Castilian rather than Latin, which is part of why Castilian became a language of learning.

1492, and the end of Jewish Toledo

The Jewish Quarter occupied the western part of the walled city and at its height held ten synagogues. The Alhambra Decree of 1492 expelled the Jewish population of Spain, and the quarter's buildings passed to other uses. Two synagogues survive. Santa María la Blanca was built around 1180. El Tránsito was built in the 1350s for Samuel ha-Levi, treasurer to Peter I of Castile, and now holds the Sephardic Museum. The street plan of the quarter is still legible, and the plaques are set in three scripts.

El Greco, 1577–1614

Doménikos Theotokópoulos was born in Crete, trained in Venice and Rome, and arrived in Toledo in 1577 aged thirty-six. He never left. The Burial of the Count of Orgaz was painted in 1586–88 for the Church of Santo Tomé, and it has hung in the room it was made for ever since. The Disrobing of Christ hangs over the altar of the Cathedral sacristy. The View and Plan of Toledo is in the Museo del Greco near the Judería. His work is the strongest single reason art visitors come here, and it is spread across four buildings rather than gathered in one.

1561: the court goes to Madrid

Charles V used Toledo as the seat of power. The Alcázar was rebuilt for him, and UNESCO names his reign as the fourth of the four phases in the city's inscription. His son Philip II moved the court permanently to Madrid in 1561. Toledo kept the primatial see and lost everything else, and the building stopped. The city you walk through is, to an unusual degree, the city of 1561, because nothing afterwards was rich enough to knock it down.

1936, and the rebuilding of the Alcázar

The Alcázar was besieged for seventy days in 1936 and reduced largely to rubble. It was rebuilt afterwards and now holds the Museo del Ejército, the Spanish army's national museum. So the fortress on the skyline is a twentieth-century reconstruction of a sixteenth-century building, standing on a Roman and Muslim site. Its silhouette — a square block with a tower at each corner — is the left half of every photograph taken of the city from across the gorge.

1986: the World Heritage listing

UNESCO inscribed the Historic City of Toledo in 1986 under criteria one, two, three and four. The citation runs through the Roman municipium, the Visigothic capital, the fortress of the Emirate, the Christian outpost and the seat of Charles V. It names the coexistence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as the condition that produced the masterpieces. That is the official reason the city is protected, and it is a fair description of what you are looking at.

The dates, in one table

Reading the history on the ground

All of it is legible on a two-hour walk, which is why guided walks here sell so well. The Roman layer is under your feet. The Muslim layer is in the arches, the Jewish layer is in the street plan, and the Christian layer is the skyline. Where each of those survives is set out on the key highlights of Toledo. What a day looks like in practice is on things to do in Toledo.

Walks that take the history seriously

Essence of Toledo: Private Tour with a Local Archaeologist

An archaeologist, the excavated Roman baths and a twelfth-century well.

From $236 per group, up to 15

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Toledo Jewish Heritage Private Tour with expert local guide

Both surviving synagogues, the Sephardic Museum and the streets between them.

From $147 per person

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Toledo Historical Small Group Tour with Cathedral & Monuments

Three admissions in the fare and an hour inside the Cathedral, in a group of ten.

From $76 per person

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Every guided walk that covers this ground is listed with its price and its length on Toledo Spain Tours. The Toledo tours from Madrid that fit the history in around a coach journey are set out there too.