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Etmology The most probable origin of the term is Latin: VALLIS, "Valley"; and Celtic: TOLITUM, "place of confluence of waters" *, The name is also linked with the Arabic name for the city بلد الوليد meaning The City of Walid. History Valladolid was captured from the Moors in the 10th century, being a small village improved by count Pedro Ansúrez in the 11th century; by the 15th century it was the residence of the kings of Castile and remained the capital of the Kingdom of Spain until 1561, when Philip II, born here, moved the capital to Madrid. Christopher Columbus died in Valladolid in 1506 in a house which is now a Museum dedicated to him. It was made the capital of the kingdom again between 1601 and 1606 by Philip III. It was in that period when Cervantes published his first edition of Don Quixote in 1604. The city nonetheless boasts few architectural manifestations of its former glory. 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. The Science Museum is next to Pisuerga river. The only surviving house of Miguel de Cervantes is also located in Valladolid. Although unfinished, Cathedral of Valladolid was designed by Juan de Herrera, architect of El Escorial. Valladolid is an economic motor of the autonomous community, having an important automobile industry (IVECO, FASA-Renault, Michelin). There is an airport at nearby Villanubla, with connections to London-Stansted, Paris, Brussels-Charleroi, Lisbon, Barcelona and Vigo. The city is also host to one of the foremost (and oldest) international film festivals, the Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid (Seminci), founded in 1956. Vallisoletanos (or pucelanos) are reputed to speak the purest Spanish of all of Spain. However this reputation is largely undeserved as a majority of Vallisoletanos break the standards of Spanish on a continuous basis. For example, the speech of Valladolid is characterized by the kind of leísmo not tolerated by the Royal Spanish Academy (the use of pronoun le instead of lo for inanimate direct object; e.g., Cómetele todo, "Eat it all"), laísmo (the use of pronoun la instead of le for feminine indirect object; e.g., La dije que viniera, "I told her to come"), and the use of certain intransitive verbs as transitive (like using quedar, "to stay", to mean dejar, "to leave"; e.g., Tu chaqueta, ¿la quedas aquí?, "Are you leaving your jacket here?"). 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. While some of these developments can be encountered elsewhere throughout Spain, other are endemic to the Valladolid area (e. g. leísmo, use of intransitive verbs as transitive). 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. See also
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