Caurium, or Curia Vetona, was its name when the Romans held Extremadura, and it was in this town, or in its vicinity, that Viriato, the Spanish hero, destroyed four Roman armies sent to conquer his wild hordes. He never lost a single battle or skirmish, and might possibly have dealt a[{279}] death-blow to Roman plans of domination in the peninsula, had not the traitor's knife ended his noble career.
Their enemy dead, the Romans entered the city of Coria, which they immediately surrounded by a circular wall half a mile in length, and twenty-six feet thick (!). This Roman wall, considered by many to be the most perfectly preserved in Europe, is severely simple in structure, and flanked by square towers; it constitutes the city's one great attraction.
The episcopal see was erected in 338. The names of the first bishops have long been forgotten, the first mentioned being one Laquinto, who signed the third Toledo Council in 589.
Two centuries later the Moors raised Al-Kárica to one of their capitals; in 854 Zeth, an ambitious Saracen warrior, freed it from the yoke of Cordoba, and reigned in the city as an independent sovereign.
Like Zamora and Toro, Coria was continually being lost and won by Christians and Moors, with this difference, that whereas the first two can be looked upon as the last Christian outposts to the north of the Duero,[{280}] Coria was the last Arab stronghold to the north of the Tago.
Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, the strong fortress on the Alagón was definitely torn from the hands of its independent sovereign by Alfonso VIII., after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. A bishop was immediately reinstated in the see, and after five centuries of Mussulman domination, Coria saw the standard of Castile waving from its citadel.
As happened with so many other provincial towns in Spain, the centralization of power to the north of Toledo shoved Coria into the background; to-day it is a cathedral village forgotten or completely ignored by the rest of Spain. Really, it might perhaps have been better for the Arabs to have preserved it, for under their rule it flourished.
It is picturesque, this village on the banks of the Alagón: a heap or bundle of red bricks surrounded by grim stone walls, over-topped by a cathedral tower and citadel,—the whole picture emerging from a prairie and thrown against a background formed by the mountains to the north and the bright blue sky in the distance.
Arab influence is only too evident in the[{281}] buildings and houses, in the Alcázar, and in the streets; unluckily, these remembrances of a happy past depress the dreamy visitor obliged to recognize the infinite sadness which accompanied the expulsion of the Moors by intolerant tyrants from the land they had inhabited, formed, and moulded to their taste. Nowhere is this so evident as in Coria, a forgotten bit of mediæval Moor-land. The poet's exclamation is full of bitterness and resignation when he exclaims:
"Is it possible that this heap of ruins should have been in other times the splendid court of Zeth and Mondhir!"