route 12 Trail through the Cidade da Cultura and Alameda Park

Cervantes Square was known in the XII century as the “Forum”, as it was a popular reunion spot and the place where the town crier read the municipal agreements and the Archbishop’s ordinances. Because of this informative vocation, one of its streets, of important commercial activity, was called “del Preguntoiro” (derived from the verb preguntar, which means “to ask”). In a corner the building erected in 1682 for the old City Hall is located, which occupied the solar for 200 years, from 1583 until its move in 1787 to Raxoi Palace. Today, it’s the only Baroque municipal building left intact in Galicia. An inside restoration allowed for the discovery of the old public scribe offices, the chapel, the archive and the dungeons: it’s known that in the square autos-da-fé were performed during Inquisition rule, and that the column around which justice was imparted and at whose feet the scaffold was located was there until 1570. The column had previously been presiding executions in Almáciga Mount and was taken to the Santa Susana Oak Grove, from where it disappeared in the XIX century.
Afterward, as it specialized in the selling of food and wares, the area received the name of Plaza
del Campo (“Countryside Square”) and the category of main market. This also explains the name of
the San Bieito do Campo church, whose contemporary neoclassical lines don’t invite thinking the
foundation goes back to the X century.
As the market was relocated to Abastos Square by the end of the XIX century, the square took the definitive name of Cervantes. A bust of the writer crowns the fountain and reminds us that the “Don Quixote” author carried two surnames of Galician origin: Cervantes and Saavedra.