Map - Province of Valladolid (Provincia de Valladolid)

Province of Valladolid (Provincia de Valladolid)
Valladolid is a province of northwest Spain, in the central part of the autonomous community of Castile and León. It has a population of 520,716 people in a total of 225 municipalities, an area of 8,110 km2 and a population density of 64.19 people per km2.

The capital is the city of Valladolid. It is bordered by the provinces of Zamora, León, Palencia, Burgos, Segovia, Ávila, and Salamanca. It is thus the only Spanish province surrounded entirely by other provinces of the same autonomous community. It is the only peninsular province which has no mountains.

Because the extensive plain on which the province lies is strategically important to overland transport, it is a major communications hub. From a national point of view it connects Madrid with the north of Spain, from Vigo in Galicia to San Sebastián in the Basque Country, and from an international point of view, it is on the shortest land route connecting Porto in the north of Portugal with Hendaye in the south of France.

The cuisine of the province is like that of Castile—meats and roasts occupy a central place. One of the most typical dishes is lechazo, a dish made from unweaned lambs, similar to veal. Suckling pig, black pudding, sausages, and sheep's milk cheeses are also traditional. The province has five wines with a denomination of origin.

The province once served as the capital of the Castilian court and the former capital of the Empire during the reigns of Emperor Carlos I, Philip II and Philip III, which explains why to this day it remains pregnant with castles and strongholds. The capital has an important historical – artistic heritage and one of the more important museums of sculpture of Europe. The province of Valladolid is specially famous for its processions of Holy Week, as much in the capital as in the localities of Medina de Rioseco and Medina del Campo. In addition, the province has two UNESCO world heritage sites within its category Memory of the World Programme: the Treaty of Tordesillas and the Archivo General de Simancas.

The province of Valladolid was established as such by the Royal Decree of 29 September 1833 driven by the minister Javier de Burgos, being attached to the historic region of Old Castile.

The first stable population that settled in the present province were the pre-Roman Vaccaei people (Spanish name: vacceos, the area that they inhabited is called "Region Vaccea") who belonged to a very advanced culture when the rest of the Celtic peoples arrived in the peninsula from the north of Europe (there is evidence that indicates that they also occupied territories corresponding to other provinces). By then, it was already defined for the chronicles as a region "free and discovered" and "an open country, wheat fields, deforested land" and the vacceos were involved in livestock farming and especially agriculture (cereals). In the year 178 BC, the Romans conquered the territory. Thus the lands that make up the current province came under their occupation, up to the barbarian invasions of the early fifth century AD when the province came under the control of the new Visigothic Kingdom.

After the invasion of the Iberian peninsula by the Muslims in the year 711, the Muslims arrived in these lands just a year later, in 712. Later, during the Reconquista, this area was the subject of battles between the Muslims and the Christian Kingdom of León in the first half of the eleventh century. In 939, after the Battle of Simancas clinched the domain of the basin of the Douro river by the Christian kingdoms. Valladolid was founded in the year 1072 by Count Pedro Ansúrez. From here its history was linked to that of the Crown of Castile. In fact, cities such as Medina del Campo or Valladolid became important administrative centers Castilians and also experienced an economic boom (mesta, fairs ... ). Had a great importance in the Discovery of the Americas in 1492 (Christopher Columbus will end up living the last years of his life until his death in 1506 in Valladolid) and the subsequent colonization with explorers such as Juan Ponce de León -discoverer of the Florida (United States)-. In fact, in some houses of Tordesillas, was signed the Treaty of Tordesillas which decided to the cast of the New World between the Catholic Monarchs and the Kingdom of Portugal giving rise to Latin America.

The revolt of the comuneros in the year 1520, which ended with the ringleaders of that revolt publicly executed in Villalar de los Comuneros. Valladolid became the capital of the Spanish empire between the years 1601–1606. When the Spanish Empire began to decline due to the continuing wars in which this involved and the emergence of new emerging powers, there was an economic decline in the area, as in the rest of the Spanish monarchy. During the War of the Spanish Succession (1700–1715) It positioned the side of the Bourbon pretender, that would be the one who got the throne. In the Peninsular War against France (1808–1814), there were a succession of small battles and the continued action of guerrillas as "The Undaunted".

In the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) Valladolid was the "most significant regional nucleus" of Falangism in the Spanish Second Republic, garnering the second-highest provincial vote for the party in the otherwise dismal (for Falangists) elections of 1936, just behind Cadiz. The province was controlled by Franco's Nationalists throughout the Civil War. During the Franco period there was an exodus from the rural countryside to the industrial cities. A further exodus occurred with the arrival of democracy in Spain (early 1980s), when the province was made part of the new autonomous community of Castile and Leon. Start a process of economic growth that peaked with the Spanish property bubble and then suffers from the economic crisis of 2008-2015, like the rest of the south of Europe. 
Map - Province of Valladolid (Provincia de Valladolid)
Country - Spain
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Spain (España, ), or the Kingdom of Spain (Reino de España), is a country primarily located in southwestern Europe with parts of territory in the Atlantic Ocean and across the Mediterranean Sea. The largest part of Spain is situated on the Iberian Peninsula; its territory also includes the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea, and the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla in Africa. The country's mainland is bordered to the south by Gibraltar; to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea; to the north by France, Andorra and the Bay of Biscay; and to the west by Portugal and the Atlantic Ocean. With an area of 505990 km2, Spain is the second-largest country in the European Union (EU) and, with a population exceeding 47.4 million, the fourth-most populous EU member state. Spain's capital and largest city is Madrid; other major urban areas include Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Zaragoza, Málaga, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Bilbao.

Anatomically modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 42,000 years ago. The ancient Iberian and Celtic tribes, along with other pre-Roman peoples, dwelled the territory maintaining contacts with foreign Mediterranean cultures. The Roman conquest and colonization of the peninsula (Hispania) ensued, bringing the Romanization of the population. Receding of Western Roman imperial authority ushered in the migration of different non-Roman peoples from Central and Northern Europe with the Visigoths as the dominant power in the peninsula by the fifth century. In the early eighth century, most of the peninsula was conquered by the Umayyad Caliphate, and during early Islamic rule, Al-Andalus became a dominant peninsular power centered in Córdoba. Several Christian kingdoms emerged in Northern Iberia, chief among them León, Castile, Aragon, Portugal, and Navarre made an intermittent southward military expansion, known as Reconquista, repelling the Islamic rule in Iberia, which culminated with the Christian seizure of the Emirate of Granada in 1492. Jews and Muslims were forced to choose between conversion to Catholicism or expulsion, and eventually the converts were expelled through different royal decrees.
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