Avila

Executive summary by darmansjah

Avila is a Spanish town located in the autonomous community of Castile and León, and is the capital of the Province of Ávila.

It 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 (and bars and restaurants) per capita in Spain. (Zamora, a town of similar size, claims the greatest number of Romanesque churches in Europe.) It is notable for having complete and prominent medieval town walls, built in the Romanesque style. The town is also known as Ávila de los Caballeros, Ávila del Rey and Ávila de los Leales (Ávila of the Knights, the King and the Loyalists), each of these epithets being present in the town standard.

The writer José Martínez Ruiz (Azorín), in his seminal book El alma castellana (The Castilian Soul), described it as "perhaps the most 16th-century town in Spain", and it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.