Vitoria-Gasteiz kept a promise to its expelled Jews for 460 years
When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the town council of Vitoria pledged to protect their cemetery, a hill still called Judizmendi, 'mountain of the Jews'. The Basque capital honoured that pledge until 1952, something unmatched anywhere else in Spain, and the site now holds a monument called Coexistence.
The city's double name joins its Spanish and Basque names, and locals use one or the other depending on the language they speak. Its origins are murky. Visigothic king Liuvigild founded a town called Victoriacum in 581 AD to celebrate a victory over the Vascones, possibly near the hilltop village of Gasteiz, but historians disagree about where it stood. Firmer ground comes in 1181, when Sancho the Wise of Navarre established Nova Victoria as a fortified outpost on the site of Gasteiz, which was already walled by the 11th century. Alfonso VIII of Castile took it in 1199 after a nine-month siege, and it received a city charter in 1431.
Europe knows the name mostly from a battle. On 21 June 1813, along the river Zadorra, Wellington's British, Portuguese and Spanish army broke the French forces of Joseph Bonaparte, clinching the end of French control in Spain. The news prompted Johann Nepomuk Mälzel to commission Beethoven's Opus 91, Wellington's Victory, and a monument to the battle stands in the Plaza de la Virgen Blanca.
The medieval old town survives with its lanes and squares, and the city is among very few with two cathedrals: the 14th-century Gothic Santa Maria, whose chapels hold paintings by Rubens and van Dyck, and a 20th-century Gothic Revival cathedral. Star architects have left marks on nearby vineyards: Santiago Calatrava shaped the Ysios winery, while Frank Gehry designed the one at Marqués de Riscal. Residents are traditionally nicknamed babazorros, Basque for bean sacks.
Vitoria-Gasteiz became the seat of the Basque Autonomous Community's shared institutions on 20 May 1980 and now houses its parliament and government. The municipality of 63 villages plus the city had 260,402 people in 2025. In 2012 it became the first Spanish city named European Green Capital, and the UN gave it a Global Green City Award in 2019.
Source: Vitoria-Gasteiz
