Alcala de Henares Audio Tours

Alcala de Henares, a UNESCO World Heritage city 35 kilometers east of Madrid, was the birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra in 1547, and the house where he was born on Calle Mayor still stands as a museum. More significantly, the town is one of the finest surviving examples of a Renaissance university city planned as a single coherent whole. Cardinal Cisneros founded the University of Alcala in 1499 as a center of humanist learning, and the main university building on Calle Colegios, the Colegio Mayor de San Ildefonso, is a masterpiece of Plateresque architecture whose ornate facade took forty years to complete.

The main street, Calle Mayor, is lined with an almost unbroken arcade of stone arches that shelters pedestrians from sun and rain, giving it a character closer to Bologna or Salamanca than the typical Spanish market town.

The Corral de Comedias theater, built in 1601 and later than Shakespeare's Globe by only a few years, is one of the oldest surviving commercial theaters in the world and still hosts performances. The Roman city of Complutum, whose ruins lie on the outskirts, adds another dimension to a place that has been significant for far longer than its famous university.