Tudela

Tudela is a municipality in the Ebro valley of Navarre, Spain, and the second largest city of that chartered community, with a population of around 35,000. It is the capital of the agricultural Ribera Navarra region and the seat of the courts of its judicial district, and fast trains and two freeways serve it. The area has been inhabited since the Lower Paleolithic, and the town grew from Celt-Iberian settlements under the Romans before the Umayyad conquest, when it became a Muslim stronghold and the base of the Banu Qasi family. Christian forces under Alfonso the Battler took it in 1119, leaving Muslims, Mozarabs and Jews living side by side, and its cathedral of Our Lady of Solitude was begun in the twelfth century. Tudela was twice a Latin bishopric, and each July it holds a week-long festival for Santa Ana with street music and bullfights.