Valladolid

41°38N 4°43W, pop (2000e) 333 000. Capital of Valladolid province, Castilla-León, NWC Spain; on R Pisuerga, 193 km/120 mi NE of Madrid; archbishopric; airport; railway; university (1346); vehicles, cement, ironwork, flour, leather goods; Columbus died here; cathedral (16th-c), Cervantes museum, Santa Cruz College; International Film Week (Apr), fair and fiesta (Sep), Festival of Spain (Oct–Nov).

Valladolid is an industrial city and its municipality in central Spain, upon the Rio Pisuerga and within the Ribera del Duero region. Some monuments include the unfinished cathedral, the church of Santa Maria la Antigua, the Plaza Mayor (the template for that of Madrid and of future main squares in the Castilian-speaking world), the National Sculpture Museum, next to the church of Saint Paul, which includes Spain's greatest collections of polychrome wood sculptures, and the Faculty of Law of the University of Valladolid, whose façade is one of the few surviving works by Narciso Tomei, the same artist who did the transparente in Toledo Cathedral. Also, yeísmo (the merging of the palatal lateral phoneme spelled ll into the palatal fricative phoneme spelled y) is nowadays widespread in Valladolid city especially among the younger generations.

Valladolid is also the city in which Christopher Columbus died in 1506.

On November 3, 2006, Valladolid signed an agreement to become a sister city to Orlando, Florida.