Alcañices
municipality of Zamora Province, Spain
Alcañices (Portuguese: Alcanises) is a small town in the province of Zamora, Spain. It is very close to the Portugal-Spain border, not far from the Portuguese town of Bragança. In fact, the Village is especially remembered for being the seat of the Treaty of Alcañices that on 12 September 1297 defined the border between Portugal and the Crown of Castile, the oldest in Europe.
Its name is of Arabic origin and means "the churches", although the origin of the town may have been a hillfort of the Zoelae.
During the Visigoths Enlisted as a free territory until in 586 King Liuvigild assigned it the Pagus Alistii to the Archbishop of Braga, which in 675 the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela claimed as his own for not agreeing with the award.
In the Reconquest, Alfonso IX of León gave it to the Order of the Temple in 1175 for its repopulation, which in 1210 built a castle and 1255 erected a Commandery. Tradition says that Saint Francis of Assisi passed through Alcañices in 1214 when he was on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.
From 1371 to 1820 Alcañices was a manor town of the March of Alcañices, which in 1741 became part of the Ducal House of Alburquerque. During this time, the Marquises built a hospital for pilgrims, an alhóndiga for communal grain, a bridge, a series of fountains and several mills and promoted the creation of a Franciscan convent, which maintained that condition until its confiscation in 1848, as well as a palace within the fortress that is currently a residence for the elderly. In the local toponymy there are still references to the Prado del Marqués or the Huerta del Marqués.
The public source identifies “Alcañices” as municipality of Zamora Province, Spain. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Alcañices, municipality and Zamora.
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Maps, plans, fabric surveys and administrative records can establish how the site’s name, extent and function changed over time. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1625868. VIAF identifies the subject as 158465240. The Library of Congress control number is n2001087907. Authority coordinates are 41.699, -6.348. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1297, 1175, 1210 and 1255.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alcañices” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.