The story of this place
Perched on a granite bend of the Tagus, Toledo was a Visigothic capital, then a Muslim city, then in 1085 the first great prize retaken by Alfonso VI. Uniquely, its Christian rulers let mosque, synagogue and church coexist, and the 12th–13th-century Toledo School of Translators rendered Arabic and Hebrew texts—Aristotle, Ptolemy, medicine, algebra—into Latin, funnelling lost Greek learning back into Europe. Two synagogues, a mosque and a soaring Gothic cathedral still stand within its walls. In the 1570s a Cretan painter named Doménikos Theotokópoulos settled here as El Greco, whose elongated, storm-lit figures made Toledo's skyline immortal.