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Valladolid has the concentrated weight of Castilian history. Philip II was born here in 1527 in a house on what is now the Calle Felipe II. Christopher Columbus died here in 1506, in a modest lodging not far from the river, believing to the end that he had found a route to Asia. From 1601 to 1606, Philip III moved the Spanish court here from Madrid, making it the capital of one of the world's largest empires for five years before Madrid's more powerful courtiers persuaded him to move back. The great Gothic-Renaissance cathedral, which Herrera began and nobody ever quite finished, stands in the centre of the city as a monument to ambition restrained by reality.

The Plaza Mayor was rebuilt after a fire in 1561 and is credited as the first of its kind in Spain, establishing the model that was later replicated in Madrid and across the Spanish world.

The Holy Week processions that fill the streets between Palm Sunday and Easter are extraordinary: thirty-one pasos, processional floats carrying polychrome wooden sculptures, most dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are carried through the streets by cofradias, the religious brotherhoods that have maintained the tradition without interruption for four hundred years. The sculptural quality, particularly the work of Juan de Juni and Gregorio Fernandez on display in the National Sculpture Museum, is at the level of any major European collection.