Albacete - History

History

The origins of the city are uncertain, although the first few confirmations of its existence are found during the Moorish domination of the area. The earliest documentation is from 1269, when Albacete was only a small village, dependent on the borough of Chinchilla. Before that, it had been a small Moorish village. Its name is derived from the Arabic البسيط Al-Basīṭ, "El Llano" ("the plain") referring to the planiform nature of the geography of the area.. It was taken by Christian troops in 1241 and was under the dominion of Alarcon.

Around the first quarter of the 14th century, in the time of the famous writer Don Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, who was the governor of Murcia and, therefore the Lord of these lands, which were to become later the Marquisate of Villena, the village began to develop and its population to increase. In 1375 it was considered a borough and became independent of Chinchilla, and a century later, in 1476, the Catholic Monarchs rewarded Albacete for supporting the Crown by granting it a licence to hold a market once a week.

During the Revolt of the Comuneros (1520–22), after initial protests, Albacete supported the new emperor Charles V who, in 1526, granted the feudal estate of the town to his wife, the Empress Isabella of Portugal. During this period, building started on the church of San Juan Bautista (St John the Baptist), which was later to become a cathedral.

Albacete is located in a strategic position between Madrid and the east coast of Spain and its agricultural wealth led to the growth of the borough during the next few centuries until Philip V granted permission for an annual fair (1710). This fair was later held in an enclosure built by Charles III (1783).

The railway reached Albacete in 1855, and the Madrid‑Alicante route passed through the town. Later, Albacete was also connected by rail to Cartagena. In 1862, Isabel II granted Albacete the title of town. Street electric lighting was inaugurated in 1888, thus being the first capital of a province in Spain with electric lighting in its streets.

Throughout the 19th century, the population of the town doubled from the 10,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the century to around 21,000 by the beginning of the 20th century. During this period, Albacete defended Queen Isabel II against the Carlists (the supporters of Charles, the pretender to the Spanish throne), supported Espartero and, just like other Spanish cities, constituted a revolutionary junta. During the long period of the Restoration (1875–1923), symptoms of caciquismo (or "boss politics," a system of dominance by a local party leader) invaded the political and social life of Albacete.

Between 1900 and the end of the Spanish Civil War (1939), the population tripled. A number of basic public works date back to that time: the water supply and sewer system (1905), the Abelardo Sanchez Park (1910–23), Tesifonte Gallego Street and the Industrial area of the town. During the Spanish Civil War (1935–39), after a brief lapse in the power of the troops who had rebelled against the Republican government, the town fell back into the hands of Madrid. For most of the war, the airbase at Los Llanos was the main headquarters of the Republican air force. It was also the headquarters of the International Brigades (supporters of the Republican cause from other countries who fought in the Spanish Civil war) and a monument has been built recently to commemorate the sixty years' anniversary of those events.

The first volume of Peter Weiss' novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is located in Albacete's Civil War days hospital “Cueva La Potita“.

In the time of the transition to democracy, the two most significant events were the establishment in Albacete in 1982 of the High Court of Justice of Castile-La Mancha, Casa de Quevedo, and the consolidation of the University, which brought new life to the town in 1985.