Turaca, Turgalium and Torgiela are some of the names that history has given to Trujillo. Because many languages have been spoken in this place, from pre-Roman languages to Arabian, and from Latin to barbaric dialects. But even with such a broad past, Trujillo always makes us think of conquerors. And it is normal. There must be something in the air of these lands for there were many overwhelming characters that came from here, such as Francisco Pizarro, who conquered Peru, Orellana who discovered the Amazon River, and Diego García de Paredes, who probably sounds less familiar, but he is the most amazing of them all. We will tell you all about it, right away.
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Turaca, Turgalium and Torgiela are some of the names that history has given to Trujillo. Because many languages have been spoken in this place, from pre-Roman languages to Arabian, and from Latin to barbaric dialects. But even with such a broad past, Trujillo always makes us think of conquerors. And it is normal. There must be something in the air of these lands for there were many overwhelming characters that came from here, such as Francisco Pizarro, who conquered Peru, Orellana who discovered the Amazon River, and Diego García de Paredes, who probably sounds less familiar, but he is the most amazing of them all. We will tell you all about it, right away.
Before it became Christian, this was a significant Islamic City. It was surrounded by a wall of which there is still remains, and it had an enormous fortress which today is known as Trujillo Castle. And it is that things were never very peaceful around here.
The day came when Columbus discovered America, and adventurers began to depart from Trujillo to the New World. Some of those who returned in one piece and with the Indians’ treasures, built snobby palaces which today are part of the city’s heritage. But of the men we named, the one that his memory has remained here is that of Pizarro, who on horseback presides over the famous and superb Plaza Mayor. Moreover, it was his daughter, Francisca Pizarro Yupanqui, who ordered the construction of the Palacio de la Conquista, the most well-known of Trujillo’s noble houses.
There are also religious monuments in the historical legacy of the town, and they too show the mark of those Spanish sixteenth-century characters, hard as a piece of rock. This is the case of the Santa María la Mayor Church, a magnificent Romanic Temple with its Gothic reconstructions, its spectacular altarpiece and its burial chamber of nobles. Everything is normal up to here. But it turns out that one of the men buried in here is Diego García de Paredes, the amazing person we mentioned at the beginning, and whose fabulous warrior prowess would leave the Cid Campeador at the level of an amateur.
So much so that the colossal man from Trujillo was compared to Samson and to Hercules, because any other references wouldn’t have been good enough for him. There you go! After covering himself with warlike glory, he went to Rome to seek his fortune and there, in a fight in the Vatican’s gardens, he killed a dozen swordsmen armed with just an iron bar. Pope Alexander VI was so impressed that he immediately named him his bodyguard.
But that was nothing for the man from Extremadura. Among other unbelievable feats, the story tells that, standing on a wall in the Greek Island of Kefalonia, he resisted alone, for three days, a whole garrison of Janissaries, Ottoman soldiers with the highest levels of training who could not understand what kind of a man, or God, they were facing. Are they exaggerations? Well, look, we’ll never know … but that’s history.