Ponferrada .

PONFERRADA

The city of Ponferrada has its origins in the Middle Ages emerging as a settlement around the Camino de Santiago.
At the end of the eleventh century, the bishop astorgano Osmundo, orders the construction of a bridge over the river Sil to facilitate the passage to the pilgrims to Compostela.

It is the “Pons Ferrata” that give name to a primitive population center, the “Puebla de San Pedro”, named for the dedication of the Romanesque church built in the twelfth century to the bridge exit.

That primitive neighborhood joins the small town that the king of Leon, Fernando II, created on the other side, on a rocky promontory around a fence.

This exhibition will be expanded in the following centuries as a fortress of the Templars as a residence for monks and other feudal lords, being the district that has established itself as city of Ponferrada.

Around the year 1178, by granting the Kings of Leon, the Templars established along the Camino de Santiago, with news of his presence in our land a few years later. King Alfonso IX donated to the Templars Ponferrada with a mission to protect those who came in pilgrimage to Compostela, as in the many abuses committed against them.

The chronicles tell that those early Templars came with the provincial master Guido de Garda at the head, Fray Helias being the first commander of Ponferrada. Tradition attributed their feats of all kinds, including the discovery of the image of the Virgen de la Encina, patron saint of the region of El Bierzo, back in the 1200s, in the hollow of an oak.

With the dissolution of the Order of the Temple, the city, important in the way of Castile to Galicia enclave, passes tenure different families that extend the strength and widen its limits: Castros and Osorios, mainly the Conde de Lemos, Pedro Alvarez Osorio.

Ponferrada develops as a city between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, a period in which the most unique and notable buildings are constructed.

In the early twentieth century, the discovery and exploitation of mineral resources, iron ore and coal, as well as the installation in 1949 of the thermal power plant of ENDESA, change the agricultural course of the city by rapid economic takeoff that makes the capital of the region.

Its status geographical center of the territory makes Ponferrada is the ideal starting point to come to know a land full of magic in its landscape and history departure: El Bierzo.