Ávila de los Caballeros (Latin: Abila and Óbila) is a town in the south of Old Castile, the capital of the province of the same name, now part of the autonomous community of Castile and León, Spain.
The city is 1117 meters (3665 feet) above sea level, the highest provincial capital in Spain. It is built on the flat summit of a rocky hill, which rises abruptly in the midst of a veritable wilderness: a brown, arid, treeless table-land, strewn with immense grey boulders, and shut in by lofty mountains. This results in an extreme climate, with very hard and long winters, and short summers.
The medieval city walls of Ávila, constructed of brown granite in 1090, and surmounted by a breastwork, with eighty-eight towers and nine gateways, are still in excellent repair, but a large part of the city lies beyond their perimeter. Ávila is the seat of a bishop and contains several ecclesiastical buildings of great interest. The Gothic cathedral, built between the 12th and 14th centuries, has the appearance of a fortress, with embattled walls and two solid towers. It contains many interesting sculptures and paintings, besides one especially fine silver pyx, the work of Juán de Arfe, dating from 1571.
The churches of San Vicente, San Pedro and San Segundo are, in their main features, Romanesque of the 12th century. In the Gothic Monastery of Santo Tomás, erected by the Catholic Queen Isabella in 1482, is especially noteworthy the marble monument, carved by the 15th-century Florentine sculptor Domenico Fancelli, over the tomb of Prince John, the only son of Ferdinand and Isabella.
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