Almagro
"Almagro is the only town I've visited where the main square looks like a stage set because, in a sense, it always was one."
A green-shuttered plaza in the heart of La Mancha holds Spain's only surviving Golden Age theater still open to the sky, and the whole town seems to perform for you without trying.
Almagro announces itself with color before it announces anything else. The Plaza Mayor is ringed with two-story arcaded galleries, their wooden frames and window casings painted a uniform, insistent green — glassed-in balconies stacked above whitewashed stone arches, running the full rectangular length of the square in a way I hadn’t seen anywhere else in Spain. The town grew rich in the sixteenth century as a trading post for the Fugger banking family, who held the rights to the nearby Almadén mercury mines, and that Central European money left its fingerprints on the architecture — those glazed balconies are closer to what you’d see in a German market town than in most of La Mancha.
The Corral de Comedias
The real reason I’d routed myself through Almagro was the Corral de Comedias, and it did not disappoint. Built in 1628 inside an old inn and rediscovered — essentially intact — beneath later renovations in the 1950s, it’s the only fully preserved open-air theater from Spain’s Golden Age still functioning as a working stage. Wooden galleries wrap three sides of a rectangular courtyard open to the sky, exactly as they would have been when companies performed Lope de Vega and Calderón de la Barca here for an audience standing in the yard below and seated in the balconies above. I sat in one of those upper galleries during a quiet afternoon visit, no performance running, just light falling through the open roof onto the worn wooden stage, and it was easy to imagine the noise and heat of a seventeenth-century evening show — no artificial light, no amplification, just voices carrying up through open air to people who’d paid to be there. Almagro still hosts its International Classical Theatre Festival every July, filling the corral and half a dozen other historic venues around town with productions that draw serious theater people from across the Spanish-speaking world.
Lace, Berenjenas, and the Quiet Streets Behind the Plaza
Wander a block or two off the Plaza Mayor and Almagro slows down considerably — narrow whitewashed streets, the occasional woman sitting in a doorway working bobbin lace, a craft called encaje de bolillos that’s been practiced here for generations and is still sold from small shops and stalls near the square. The other thing Almagro is quietly famous for is berenjenas de Almagro, small pickled eggplants preserved in brine and spices, a specific enough local product that they carry a Protected Geographical Indication. I ordered a plate at a bar just off the plaza without knowing what to expect and they arrived tart, slightly bitter, faintly spiced — nothing like any pickle I’d had before, and genuinely addictive by the third one.
When to go: July brings the Festival Internacional de Teatro Clásico, when the town is at its most alive, though the heat of the La Mancha plain is serious by midday; late September offers the same golden light with far more comfortable temperatures.