Indian Chief Travel Guides

A Brief History of Toledo

The city of Toledo came into its own once the Visigoths had displaced another Germanic tribe, the Alani, in AD 453, and established Toledo as the capital of their Hispania. Prior to this, the Romans had founded Toletum, as it was then known, in 192 BC over a land that had seen the settlement of Celtiberians and Iberians.

A local tradition has it that the city, by all accounts unassailable, was lost to the Visigoths by a dastardly duo of double-cross. First it took King Roderick, the last ruler of the Visigoths, to grow fond of his close friend and advisor’s young daughter. In the annals of legend he began to watch her, from a hidden perch, as she bathed in the Turía River that wraps around the city and carves a natural defensive gorge on three of its sides. One fated day, when he could no longer contain his passion, he thrashed out into the water and raped the girl. Learning of this, the advisor resolved to get even and stormed off to Morocco where he recruited the assistance of the Moors and led them into the country for what would turn out to be a very, very long stay. The Moors defeated Roderick’s troops and thereafter conquered the heavily fortified city of Toledo with the help of the advisor, who had shared his knowledge of the city’s vulnerable areas.

The Moors would rule Toledo and much of the country from AD 712 on, until the Christians under King Alfonso VI took back the city in 1085 and the Catholic Monarchs the country in 1492. King Carlos V and his son Felipe II kept their courts at Toledo until 1565, when the capital of Spain was once and for all established in Madrid, just 40 km (24 miles) north.

The move was made in some part because of the lack of space within the fortified area of Toledo (as a small consolation, Toledo was named capital of Castilla-La Mancha in the 1980s); the result was that its population was held low, buildings were constructed tall and tight – to the point that they came to obscure much of the heralded Catedral.