Valladolid

Valladolid has been the capital of Spain twice and briefly. The court sat here in the sixteenth century and again from 1601 to 1606, and the city kept what the court left: Cervantes's house, the room where Columbus died in 1506, a university founded in the thirteenth century, and the National Sculpture Museum, which holds the polychrome wood carving of the Castilian Golden Age. Those same figures come out on the shoulders of the brotherhoods in Holy Week, when Valladolid stages one of the most severe processions in Spain. The rest of the year it is a working city on the Pisuerga, surrounded by Ribera del Duero vines.