Monumental Vilafranca

A stroll along the Catalan Gothic architecture without moving the center of the capital del Penedes

Vilafranca was born at the beginning of the XIIth century, in the Middle Ages. In 1108, after the last Islamic incursion in the line or border of Penedès, the Count Ramón Berenguer III granted the inhabitants of Olèrdola an exemption letter awarding the fiscal privileges to the people who settled in the city under the protection of the crown.

Olèrdola, “home of the Penedès” was abandoned and the new Villa Franca took over as the capital of the Penedès region. With the change of the border to the south, Vilafranca became one of the most important cities of the territory, configured as a typical medieval city: the enclosure of the wall, the trade area, the secular and ecclesiastical nobility, the Jewish quarter and the outer convents.

Churches, convents and medieval palaces, museums, modernist houses, wineries … Streets and squares that evoke different historical episodes of nine centuries chronicles. A history lesson in the open air.
Jaume I square is the heart of the founding time of the city, in the Middle Ages.

Presiding the square we find the basilica of Santa María, built between 1285 and 1484, being one of the first examples of Catalonian southern gothic church, developed from the French gothic. Opposite we find the Royal Palace of the Catalonian Counts-Kings, from the XIIth century, where King Pere II the Great died, and which nowadays is the venue of Vinseum, the Wine Culture Museum of Catalunya.