Valladolid, the former capital city of Spain, has had an Augustinian presence for centuries.
The word Valladolid come from the Arabic language.
Valladolid was the Arabic city of Belad-Walid (meaning "Land of the Governor") is located at the confluence of the Río Esgueva and Río Pisuerga.
It has some of the best Renaissance art and architecture in Spain.
From the 13th century until its eventual decay in the early 17th century, Valladolid was a royal city and an intellectual centre that attracted saints and philosophers.
It was the home of the kings of Castile between the 12th and 17th centuries.
It was here in 1469 that Ferdinand married Isabella, joining the kingdoms of Aragón, Catalonia, Naples, Castile, and León into a united Spain.
King Philip II was born there, and Columbus died there on 19th May 1506, broken in spirit and body after Isabella had died and Ferdinand refused to reinstate him as a governor of the Indies.
José Zorrilla, who in 1844 made popular the legendary Don Juan in his play was also born in the city.
Spanish men were recruited to become Augustinians for the Philippine missions. A Province of the Philippines was established by the Prior General in 1575. Initially it had no seminary of its own, and received Augustinians from the Spanish Augustinian Provinces who were permitted to volunteer for ministry in the Philippines.
In 1736 permission was received from the Pope to establish a special college in Valladolid specifically to prepare such men for Augustinian ministry in the Philippines.
The monastery (convento) is of neoclassic style, the work of Luke Rodriguez. It was begun in 1759 and finished in 1930.
In that it trained priersts only for foreign missions, it was exempted from the suppression by the government of every house (convento) belonging to a religious order in Spain in 1835-1837. After 1835, its forty-nine Augustinian friars were the only Augustinians officially permitted to live in community in Spain. (There were then 250 Spanish Augustinians ministering in the Philippines.)
It subsequently came also to serve as a centre for the restoration of the Order in Spain.
In the monastery that is still in use, the Augustinians can indicate the stone stairways that were chipped when the soldiers of Napoleon Bonaparte hauled their canons to the upper levels of the building.
Of greater historic importance, however, is its Oriental Museum, containing rare and often unique artefacts sent back by early Spanish Augustinian missionaries to the Orient.
The Oriental Museum was founded on 1908. It was given new facilities in 1980, and they were opened by the king and queen of Spain, Reyes de España, Don Juan Carlos I y Doña Sofía, on 12th October 1980.
Its extraordinary collection of Chinese and Philippine art of the previous three centuries is one of the greatest collections of Eastern art in all of Europe.
The museum fills thirteen rooms, the majority exposing of the porcelain parts, bronzes, the sculptures and paintings of China, as of the weapons, the ornaments, the ivories and other objets d'art coming from the Philippines and Japan.
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