User:Kberberian/Ávila

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Ávila ( UK: /ˈævɪlə/ AV-il-ə, US: /ˈɑːv-/ AHV-, Spanish: [ˈaβila] ⓘ) is a city of Spain located in the autonomous community of Castile and León. It is the capital and most populated municipality of the Province of Ávila.

It lies on the right bank of the Adaja river. Located more than 1,130 m above sea level, the city is the highest provincial capital in Spain.

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Distinctively known by its medieval walls, Ávila 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. It has complete and prominent medieval town walls, built in the Romanesque style; writer José Martínez Ruiz, in his book El alma castellana ("The Castilian Soul"), described it as "perhaps the most 16th-century town in Spain". The town is also known as Ávila de los Caballeros, Ávila del Rey and Ávila de los Leales ("Ávila of the knights", "Ávila of the king", "Ávila of the loyal ones"), each of these epithets being present in the town standard.

Orson Welles once named Ávila as the place in which he would most desire to live, calling it a "strange, tragic place". Various scenes of his 1965 film Chimes at Midnight were filmed in the town.

Ávila was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985. The site originally consisted of the walled city and four extra muros churches. The number of churches included in the site has since been increased.

Geography

Situated 1132 metres (3714 feet) above sea level on a rocky outcrop on the right bank of the Adaja river, a tributary of the Duero, Ávila is 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 city is located exactly 72 miles northwest of Madrid. Also this city is known for it's medieval walls and sometimes is refered to as the town of stones and saints.

Saint Teresa of Avila (16th Century)

The Avila of Saint Teresa, the spread of growth and development of the Avila of Saint Teresa has contributed to a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the social and religious history of Spain and Catholic Europe. The study of Jews, Conversos, and Moriscos in the late 15th and early 17th century Spain has exploded in the last twenty-five years. A number of factors have contributed to the intense scholarly interest in Spain's multi-ethnic past, including historians' increased attention to marginalized groups in general and their distance from the forced silence on the subject during the Franco dictatorship, as well as the expansion of programs in Jewish and Islamic studies, including Hebrew, Arabic, or their iberian variants, Ladino or Aljamia.

"The Avila of Saint Teresa" Bilinkoff Jodi https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/montclair/reader.action?docID=3138703 2015 Cornell University Press