Avila, Spain: Walking the Medieval City Walls

Few towns announce themselves as plainly as Ávila, Spain. Approach across the high plain of Castile and the first thing you see is the wall: a granite ring more than two and a half kilometres around, studded with rounded towers and almost entirely intact, enclosing the old city on its ridge above the River Adaja. UNESCO describes Ávila as an outstanding example of a fortified city of the Middle Ages whose surrounding walls are fully intact. It is also the city of Saint Teresa, the sixteenth-century mystic and reformer, and the setting for a cluster of Romanesque churches outside the walls. This guide covers how the walls came to be built, how much of them you can actually walk, where Saint Teresa’s story can still be traced, and how Ávila fits on the road west from Madrid. On Day 11 of our small group tour of Spain and Portugal, the group pauses at Ávila to view the medieval walls on the way to Salamanca.

A wall built for a frontier

Ávila’s walls belong to the long medieval struggle for the Iberian Peninsula. After the Christian capture of Toledo in 1085, the kings of Castile set about resettling the depopulated land between the Duero and the mountains, and Ávila became one of the strongholds of that repopulation. UNESCO calls it the best-known example of a fortified city created by this policy. Tradition dates the start of work on the walls to about 1090, though the regional tourism authority of Castile and León notes that the wall standing today appears to have been raised largely in the twelfth century.

The figures are impressive. The circuit runs for 2,516 metres around an irregular rectangle of old town, with nine gates and, by the count of the city’s official walls website and the Junta de Castilla y León, 87 towers, though other sources, including UNESCO’s own summary, give figures between 82 and 88. The walls average about three metres thick and around twelve metres high, and they were built of the local granite, with older material pressed into service: Roman building stones and funerary stelae are set into the masonry, and the official walls website points out reused Roman cists, stelae and carved stone animals, the verracos of the region, in the gardens beside the eastern stretch. The old town was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1985, and the listing was extended in 2007 to take in more of the churches and convents outside the walls.

The gates and the cathedral in the wall

The strongest defences face east, where the ground outside is flat and offered attackers the easiest approach. Here the towers rise to about 15 metres, and the two great gates, the Puerta de San Vicente and the Puerta del Alcázar, are each flanked by twin towers joined by an arch. The Alcázar gate, beside the large square known locally as El Grande, was remodelled under Philip II at the end of the sixteenth century, as its inscription and coat of arms record. Inside its tower, the Torreón del Homenaje, a multimedia room shows short films about the walls.

The most remarkable stretch, though, is the cathedral. Its apse, known as the cimorro, does not sit behind the wall but forms part of it, a church that doubled as a fortress tower. The Junta’s heritage service describes the cathedral as the first Gothic cathedral in Spain, built in granite, and Spain’s national tourism board highlights its choir and the main altarpiece by Pedro Berruguete and others. Elsewhere on the circuit, look for the Puerta del Carmen on the north side, a skewed entrance that forced attackers to turn rather than charge straight in, and the Puerta del Puente on the west, where travellers once crossed the Adaja.

How much of the wall can you walk?

You can walk about 1,700 metres along the top of Ávila’s walls, roughly two thirds of the full 2,516-metre circuit, but not as one continuous loop. The walkway, or adarve, is divided into two separate sections, because towers and buildings set against the wall block the way in places, and the official walls website notes that work to prepare the south and part of the west side for walkers is still unfinished. The longer section, about 1.4 kilometres, starts beside the cathedral and runs along the eastern and northern walls past the Puerta del Carmen, where a tower gives an exit and a small exhibition space, and on down the western side towards the Puerta del Puente. The shorter section, about 260 metres, is reached by a staircase inside the Puerta del Alcázar and looks down over the square and the cathedral. A single ticket covers both.

The main entrance beside the cathedral is in the Casa de las Carnicerías, the city’s former butchers’ hall, built in 1590 and 1591 and now the municipal tourist office. The official website also describes an adapted access at the Puerta del Puente, on the western side, opened in 2008, where three ramps and a lift lead up to a stretch of about 100 metres of wall-walk suitable for wheelchair users and visitors with reduced mobility. Opening hours change with the seasons, with longer evening hours in summer and, at the time of writing, a Monday closure in winter, so check the official Muralla de Ávila website before you go. Dramatised night visits on the walls are also staged on some summer evenings.

Is it worth walking the walls of Ávila?

Yes: the wall-walk is the best way to understand both the fortifications and the city they protected. From the top you look down into the patios and gardens of the old mansions on one side and out across open country to the sierras on the other, and you can see how the rounded towers follow one another at close intervals along the north side. If time is short, the section beside the cathedral gives the higher, more varied views and a good look at the Basilica of San Vicente below.

How long do you need in Ávila?

Allow half a day to see the main sights of Ávila on foot, and a full day if you want to visit the convents and churches at an unhurried pace. Both walkable sections of the wall can be covered in an hour or more, leaving time for the cathedral, the Basilica of San Vicente and a stroll through the old town. Ávila also makes a straightforward day trip from Madrid: Spain’s national tourism board gives about an hour and a half by train from Príncipe Pío station, or about an hour and twenty minutes by coach.

Walking around the outside of the walls

The walls are as rewarding from the ground as from the top. The official walls website describes the full walk around the outside as a stroll of almost three kilometres, possible all the way round on the exterior, and suggests starting at the cathedral apse. The north side gives the classic view of tower after tower with few buildings in the way, while the west side drops towards the Adaja, past the old bridge and the Romanesque shrine of San Segundo, the city’s patron saint.

For the most famous view of all, cross the river to the Cuatro Postes, a small shrine of four columns around a cross on the rise to the west, roughly a twenty-minute walk from the cathedral. From here the whole western flank of the city is laid out in one sweep. Come at twilight if you can: the walls are floodlit at night, and the golden stone against a darkening sky is the image most visitors carry away from Ávila.

Saint Teresa’s Ávila

Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Ávila in 1515, and in 2015 Spain marked the fifth centenary of her birth. The Convento de Santa Teresa stands on the site of her family home, inside the walls near the southern gate that now carries her name, the Puerta de la Santa. Work on the church began in 1629 under the Carmelite architect Fray Alonso de San José, and it was inaugurated in 1636. The vaulted crypt beneath it now holds a museum devoted to the saint, with some 30 rooms of objects, and the church contains a seventeenth-century sculptural group by Gregorio Fernández and his workshop. Nearby is the church of San Juan Bautista, where she was baptised.

Outside the walls to the north, the Monasterio de la Encarnación is where Teresa entered the Carmelite order as a novice in 1535. She lived there for 27 years and later served as its prioress; Saint John of the Cross served as chaplain and confessor to the nuns between 1572 and 1577, and the cell she occupied was later made into a chapel. In 1562 she founded the convent of San José in Ávila, the first house of her reformed Carmelites. Teresa died in 1582 at Alba de Tormes, near Salamanca, was canonised in 1622, and in 1970 became the first woman named a Doctor of the Church. Her writings, among them The Way of Perfection and The Interior Castle, remain classics of Spanish prose. Beside the Paseo del Rastro on the south side of town, the Centro de Interpretación de la Mística is devoted to the mystical tradition she did so much to shape, and the bakeries sell yemas de Santa Teresa, small sweets made from egg yolk and sugar that are Ávila’s best-known treat.

The Romanesque churches outside the walls

Ávila’s World Heritage listing is titled the Old Town of Ávila with its Extra-Muros Churches, and the churches beyond the walls deserve time of their own. UNESCO names four original Romanesque churches, San Vicente, San Pedro, San Andrés and San Segundo, and the 2007 extension added the Romanesque churches of San Nicolás, Santa María de la Cabeza and San Martín, together with three convents: La Encarnación, San José and the Real Monasterio de Santo Tomás. The Basilica of San Vicente, just outside the gate of the same name, is the grandest of them, while San Pedro faces the Puerta del Alcázar across the main square.

How much walking is involved in a visit to Ávila?

A visit involves a moderate amount of walking, with stairs, slopes and cobbles. Getting onto the wall-walk means climbing stairs, as at the Puerta del Alcázar; the adapted entrance at the Puerta del Puente, with ramps and a lift, gives step-free access only to a short stretch of about 100 metres, and the walkway itself is old stone. The old town sits on a ridge, so the streets slope, especially down towards the river, and the walk out to the Cuatro Postes viewpoint involves crossing the valley and climbing the far side. Ávila stands at 1,131 metres, the highest provincial capital in Spain, so it can be windy and cold outside summer; bring a warm layer and comfortable shoes with good grip.

Where Ávila, Spain sits between Madrid and Salamanca

Ávila lies north-west of Madrid, across the Sierra de Guadarrama, and on the direct road to Salamanca, which makes it a natural stop on any journey west. On Day 11 of the tour, the group checks out of the hotel in Madrid and first visits the Royal Monastery of El Escorial, Philip II’s palace and monastery in the foothills. The group then continues to Ávila, pausing to view the medieval walls, before arriving in Salamanca for dinner at a local restaurant. Because the Ávila stop is a pause rather than a full day, this guide may help you decide whether to come back on your own to walk the ramparts.

The next day is given to Salamanca itself, with its old and new cathedrals, the Casa de las Conchas and the university; our guide to Salamanca, the university city on the way to Portugal covers it in depth. From there the route turns west, and our article on crossing from Salamanca into Portugal follows that stage of the journey. For the whole 24-day route from Barcelona to Granada, see our Spain and Portugal itinerary.

The tour is rated Level 2, Moderate: participants should be able to manage three to five hours of activity a day, the equivalent of walking up to 8 kilometres on uneven ground, and climb and descend stairs. An Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group throughout.

Ávila rewards even a short stop. Its walls show, more completely than anywhere else in Spain, what a fortified frontier town of medieval Castile looked like, and the stories of Saint Teresa and the Romanesque builders give the stone a human scale. On our Spain and Portugal small group tour, a group of up to 16 travellers sees the walls between El Escorial and Salamanca, with an Odyssey Program Leader to put them in context.