Feast of Santa Theresa, Avila, Spain

By Patrick Totty

The story goes that Saint Theresa, Spain’s great doctor of the Catholic Church, was once returning to her convent from an errand when there was a sudden rainstorm. The downpour quickly slicked the dirt road she was traipsing and she soon slipped and fell face down in the mud. She picked herself up, wiped the ooze from her face and looked angrily at the sky. “If this is how you treat your friends,” she yelled, shaking a fist as she called out to her maker, “no wonder why you have so few of them!”

By herself, feisty Theresa might have been enough to put the town of Avila on the map, but it didn’t hurt that the small central Spanish city of 50,000, about 60 air miles northwest of Madrid, has the finest medieval walls in all of Spain. They are in such good condition, and fit the ideal image of Middle Ages ramparts so well that Hollywood filmed several scenes of its 1961 Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic El Cid using Avila as background.

Though it has a 2,000-plus-year history, going back to Roman times, Avila has been more of a survivor than a major player in Spanish history. It was occupied by the Moors until 1088, and subsequently prospered, but lost its entrepreneurs and intelligentsia when it booted out its Moriscos – Muslim families that had converted to Christianity generations before during the Reconquista – in the early 17^th century. That bonehead move consigned the town to permanent status as a medieval backwater.

That was bad for the Avila chamber of commerce, but good for historians and travelers. Avila’s subsequent descent into drowsiness kept it small and behind its medieval walls. It took hundreds of years until the town’s population finally spilled outside the walls. In the meantime, Avila’s citizens fastidiously maintained them.

Initial construction of the walls began in the late 11^th century. Eventually the massive ramparts formed a 1.5-mile-long stone barrier, punctuated with 88 towers and pierced by nine heavily defended gates. It was the most advanced fortification of its day in Spain

The town’s other notable architectural feature is the cathedral, built right into the city walls and showing both Romanesque and Gothic influences – a reflection of the many years it typically took to complete large churches in the Middle Ages. 

Back to St. Theresa: Besides its walls and cathedral, Avila is little more than a day trip destination. The best occasion for lingering comes every Oct. 8 through 15 when the townspeople take a week to celebrate her importance to the Catholic faith. St. Theresa is one of 33 Doctors of the Catholic Church, a title that honors the church’s greatest theologians and experts in doctrinal apologetics over its 2,000-year history. St. Theresa resides with such luminaries as Augustine, Jerome, Aquinas, Gregory the Great and Catherine in that select group.

The festival itself is a hodge-podge of activities – there are outdoor dances, street entertainments, parades, sports competitions and various excuses to eat a lot. As in typical in deeply devout Catholic regions, the festiveness combines piety and gaiety in a totally tensionless manner. Avilans love Theresa and her deep spirituality, and are proud of her as Avila’s greatest child. While many of them strive to be as devoted as she was to a moral and ordered life, they make no bones about taking full advantage of her feast day’s Oct. 15 occurrence. October is a great time of year: the  harvests are coming in, the wine grapes have been picked and the weather's nice. That last observation is crucial, because Avila, situated at 3,700 feet on Spain’s treeless tableland, the meseta, is one cold burg in winter.