Salamanca Tourist Brochure

T ORRE DEL E VANGELIO O DE LAS CAMPANAS

C ATEDRAL NUEVA

L A C LERECÍA

C ONVENTO DE S AN E STEBAN

T h e C i t y o f t h o u g h t

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n order to be able to “understand” a city, which is like a permanently changing living creature, it is necessary to find its culture, the clues that explain it and the symbolic and real doors through which we can “enter” the city itself. Salamanca is also the Middle Ages, the repopulation of the Castilian Extremadura, the baroque style, the modernist city, the crisis of the XIX century and Unamuno s crisis as well. Thus, Salamanca is vetona, medieval, baroque, open 24 hours a day, student city; it is World Heritage City, European Capital City of Culture, Modernist, the city of Fray Luis de Leon, Villena, Unamuno or Vitoria, but, above all, the city of thought, a university and uni- versal city. The new society of knowledge turns the thought into one of the ways of main deve- lopment in countries and cities. At the end of the XIX century, factories symbolised the industrial society era and nowadays, machines have been substituted by a new value, the knowledge, as the main instrument of work in the new millennium. In this sense, Salamanca has been, throughout its history, a significant centre of knowledge and universal projection. This is some knowledge that was developed inside the city itself, but it was established in the outside as well, thanks to its architecture or lite- rature. It is considered the Spanish Renaissance city par excellence and this makes it be uni- que, due to its architectural and urban aesthetics that has lasted to these days, and also to the especial relevance that the humanist thought and the desire for knowing, both of them typical of this period, transmitted to the city. Thus, Salamanca, with its palaces, con- vents, large houses and squares, and with its protagonists, such as Fray Luis de León or Francisco de Vitoria, highlights a period of especial impulse for the city. However, it would not be fair to limit the life of the city just to those glorious moments, because cities are not only built during prosperous times. The heart beatings of Salamanca, as a space of knowledge and wisdom, have been having ups and downs throughout its history; undoubtedly, the search for that knowled- ge is the reason why the city is past and present as well, due to its interest in culture, dynamic university and the fact of having recently been the cultural capital city.

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