A walled town on the Castilian plain whose ring of towers gave it its name, where Isabella I was born in 1451 and where the Cortes of 1476 created the Santa Hermandad.
Madrigal de las Altas Torres sits on the flat cereal country of the northern Castilian plain, in the province of Ávila, between Medina del Campo and Arévalo. The second half of the name is a description: the town was walled in the Middle Ages on a nearly circular plan, and the circuit was studded with towers — close to a hundred of them by the usual count, which is what gave the place its "high towers".
It was a royal town rather than a great one, and its importance comes from the Trastámara dynasty’s habit of using it. Isabella I was born here on 22 April 1451, and in the spring of 1476, in the first uncertain months of her reign, the Cortes assembled here and created the institution that would police the Castilian roads for the next generation.
The enclosure is the town’s defining monument. Laid out as an almost perfect ring around the settlement, it is unusual among Castilian walls for its regularity, and although much has gone, substantial stretches survive — most notably on the south-western side — along with gates including the Puerta de Cantalapiedra on the west.
What survives is brick and rammed earth rather than dressed stone, the normal building materials of this treeless, quarry-poor plain, and the same materials govern the look of the town’s churches. The whole walled enclosure is protected as a Bien de Interés Cultural.
Madrigal received a fuero — the charter of local law and privileges that defined a Castilian town’s standing — in 1017, granted by the bishop of Burgos, and it was ratified again in 1168. By the late Middle Ages the town was closely bound to the House of Trastámara, whose kings stayed and held court here.
Its ecclesiastical fabric belongs to the same world: the church of San Nicolás de Bari dates from the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and is Mudéjar work, built in the brickwork tradition that Christian Castile took over from al-Andalus. The town also produced one of the most prolific theologians of fifteenth-century Spain, Alonso Fernández de Madrigal, known as El Tostado, who died in 1455 and who took his name from the place.
The royal residence at Madrigal, the Palacio de Juan II, is where Isabella was born in 1451, the daughter of John II of Castile and his second wife Isabella of Portugal. It is a plain, essentially Mudéjar building rather than a showpiece — a working royal lodging on the itinerary of a travelling court.
Isabella’s connection with the town was brief. Her father died in 1454, and her mother withdrew with Isabella and her younger brother Alfonso, born in 1453, to Arévalo, where the three of them lived in reduced and often straitened circumstances on the fringe of the court of her half-brother Henry IV. The palace itself later became the convent of Nuestra Señora de Gracia, occupied by Augustinian nuns, which is what preserved it.
In April 1476 the Cortes of Castile met at Madrigal, early in the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand and in the middle of the war over her succession. On 19 April they issued the Ordenamiento de Madrigal, which established the Santa Hermandad — a standing armed brotherhood organised across eight provinces including Burgos, Salamanca, Valladolid, León, Segovia, Ávila, Palencia and Zamora, with its own council and its own officers.
It was funded by a levy on sales and fielded something like two thousand men, known from their uniform as the mangas verdes, the green sleeves. The point of it was order: brigandage and private noble warfare had made the roads unusable, and the Hermandad gave the crown a force answerable to itself rather than to the nobility. For a small walled town on the plain it is a considerable claim on Castilian history — a queen born in one century of its life and a royal instrument of government founded in another.