The Walls of Avila
by Pablo Lopez
Title
The Walls of Avila
Artist
Pablo Lopez
Medium
Photograph - Digital Image
Description
Avila is a Spanish town located in the autonomous community of Castile and Leon, and is the capital of the Province of Avila.
Its main monument is the imposing medieval Walls of Avila (11th-14th centuries), begun in 1090. The enclosed area is 31 hectares (77 acres) with a perimeter of 2,516 metres (2,752 yd), 88 blocks or semicircular towers, 2,500 merlons, curtain walls 3 m (9 ft 10 in) thick, with an average height of 12 m (39 ft) and 9 gates. It is the largest fully illuminated monument in the world. It is possible to walk upon the walls themselves for roughly half their circumference. Whilst some of the walls will never be navigable in this way because of their integration into other structures, there is a large stretch of the walls that has yet to be made safe for pedestrians.
It is sometimes called the Town of Stones and Saints, and it claims that it is one of the towns with the highest number of Romanesque and Gothic churches per capita in Spain. The town is also known as Avila de los Caballeros, Avila del Rey and Avila de los Leales (Avila of the Knights, the King and the Loyalists), each of these epithets being present in the town standard.
The writer Jose Martinez Ruiz, in his book El alma castellana (The Castilian Soul), described it as 'perhaps the most 16th-century town in Spain', and it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.
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March 27th, 2017
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