The Spanish university town that helped shape the modern calendar
Salamanca's university, founded in 1218, ranks among Western Europe's oldest. Its scholars wrote the first grammar of Spanish, debated Columbus's voyage and sent calendar studies that fed into the Gregorian reform, while the city's golden stone old town is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site drawing students and cultural tourists.
The city sits on the northern half of Spain's central plateau, astride the Tormes river, and had 144,458 residents in 2024. People first settled on the Cerro de San Vicente hill in the Iron Age. By the 3rd century BC a larger town had grown on the neighbouring hill where the cathedrals now stand, under the influence of Celtic peoples, the Vaccaei and Vettones. In 220 BC Hannibal besieged it; Plutarch and Polybius tell of townswomen hiding weapons and fighting back, and of Hannibal returning the city out of admiration for their courage.
Rome turned the settlement into Salmantica, and three Roman legacies still shape it: the Calzada de la Plata road, a bridge over the Tormes whose northern half survives, and an early wall around the cathedral hill. A marble statue of a toga-wearing man, found in 2015 under a house on calle Libreros, is the only Roman sculpture yet recovered from beneath the city. After Musa ibn Nusayr took the town in 712 it slid into near-emptiness, and resettlement only gathered pace after the Christian victory at Simancas in 939.
Even the name is a puzzle. Greek writers called it Helmantike, Livy wrote Hermandica, and one legend credits the founding to Teucer, a veteran of the Trojan War. The philologist Martín S. Ruipérez argued that the first element, sala-, meant a river ford.
Salamanca's golden age was intellectual. Antonio de Nebrija published his Castilian grammar there in 1492, the first rulebook for a Western European language other than Latin. Francisco de Vitoria's School of Salamanca defended the rights of peoples in the New World and helped found international law. Mathematicians from the university produced studies in 1515 and 1578 that fed the calendar reform later named after Pope Gregory XIII, and the oldest surviving printed book on modern chess appeared in the city in 1496.
Source: Salamanca
