Historic City Threatening to Become Just for Tourists : Spanish Seek to Reconcile Toledo’s Medieval Charm With Modern Life

When Mario Muelas leaves the construction site in the winter twilight, he walks to his car through narrow alleys where Christians, Muslims and Jews once rubbed shoulders. Then he drives four centuries back home to Madrid.

The 45-year-old architect is working in the vast, 16th-Century San Pedro Martyr convent complex, drawing up and executing plans to turn it into a modern government administrative center.

“Some days when I leave I feel like I’m emerging from the 15th or 16th centuries, I don’t know where I am,” Muelas says, surveying one of three cloistered patios that form the core of the former Dominican convent that expanded to about the size of a soccer field through the heart of Toledo as the Roman Catholic order grew in power.

The transformation of the convent, which has also served as an army barracks, stables, home for the elderly and orphanage, is the largest project yet undertaken in the preservation and restoration of Toledo, a once strategic city on a hill whose origins go back to the Roman colony of Hispania.

Monumental Symbol

Like Venice in Italy and Fez in Morocco, Toledo has been declared part of the world’s cultural patrimony by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. And as in the case of Venice and Fez, Toledo needs more than declarations to help it remain a living city as well as a monumental symbol of a time when three of the world’s major religious cultures thrived together on a rocky outcropping of the La Mancha plain.

Rose-Anne Bartholomew, wife of U.S. Ambassador Reginald Bartholomew, calls Toledo “one of the places where three cultures lived successfully,” comparing the city’s former mix to that of Jerusalem and Beirut in their finer days.

Bartholomew is the only non-Spanish member of the board of directors of the year-old Toledo Foundation, which seeks to mobilize the interest, government support and independent financial backing necessary to save the city. She hopes to set up a U.S. branch when she returns to Washington after her husband leaves his post in Spain this year.

The group has just moved into its headquarters in a room at one end of the medieval St. Martin Bridge that has been renovated by Toledo youths employed at a restoration workshop school set up by the regional government of Castille-La Mancha.

Convents like San Pedro Martyr are a key element in the future of Toledo. There are some 50 within the old, walled portion of the city. Most were built to house at least 400 cloistered nuns each but now have fewer than 20 inhabitants, most of whom are over 65.

Since the Spanish state confiscated much of the church’s property in 1834, the convents have fallen on hard times.

The rehabilitation of San Pedro Martyr--Muelas says the Dominicans meant it originally as an administrative center for some aspects of the Spanish Inquisition when they opened it in 1540--is budgeted at $10 million. The Spanish interior and economy ministries are paying the bill, rather than building something new in Toledo’s industrial park across the Tagus River.

Study Center

Another convent, San Juan de la Penitencia, has been turned into an international studies center for North and South American students sponsored by the University of Minnesota and Spain’s Jose Ortega y Gasset Foundation.

The center has served as the setting for several tricultural congresses.

Roman Catholics and Jews lived under Muslim rule when the Moors incorporated Toledo into the Cordoba Emirate in 711, before it became the capital of an independent Moorish kingdom in 1012. The city was reconquered by a Christian king in 1085 and reached its glory under the 1252-1284 reign of Alfonso X, or Alfonso the Wise.

At the height of his rule, Toledo became the most important Jewish center in Spain, a country known in Hebrew as Sepharad, from which Sephardic Jews get their name. Moorish artisans using brick construction, carved wood, sculpted plaster and painted tiles built the Transito and Santa Maria la Blanca synagogues.

Then, in 1492, Queen Isabella signed an edict banishing all Muslims and Jews from Spain in an effort to consolidate her position on the Iberian Peninsula.

As part of the commemoration of the 500th anniversary in 1992 of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World, the Spanish government has declared Toledo the headquarters of Sepharad 92 and a symbol of Spain’s “re-encounter” with its Jewish heritage.

When Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, visited Toledo a year ago, Mayor Jose Antonio Molina told him the old city needed $100 million over the next two decades to reverse a depopulation trend that threatens to turn the city into a ghost town filled with monuments and tourist shops.

Of Toledo’s 60,000 inhabitants, about 16,000 live inside the city’s Moorish walls, where streets are only as wide as a person’s outstretched arms, parking is impossible and “everyone knows what you’re doing,” in the words of Steve Kennedy, an Englishman married to a Spaniard who lived in the old city for six years.

On evenings and weekends, the main Zocodover Plaza fills with people who come to gossip, drink or buy almond-paste marzipan, a Moorish-Jewish legacy and a Toledo speciality.

Abandoned by Owners

Many of the dwellings in Toledo have been abandoned over the years by squabbling heirs who don’t want to live 42 miles from much more up-to-date Madrid. Many are either palaces or hovels, too big or too small for single families.

Former Mayor Juan Ignacio de Mesa, a member of the foundation’s board of directors, is looking for a way to use state-of-the-art technology to make a medieval city livable.

De Mesa is working with representatives of the city’s major industries--Alcatel, Nixdorf and the Beecham and Jansen pharmaceutical firms--to solve mundane but pressing problems of what to do with the electrical and telephone lines that dangle in clusters and crisscross narrow streets and the television antennae that sprout from red-tile roofs.

The Spanish government, through the Ministry of Culture’s restoration department, has earmarked 81.6 million pesetas ($710,000) in 1989 for work on Toledo’s magnificent 13th-Century cathedral, the Tornerias mosque, Santa Maria la Blanca and the Santa Fe convent. A similar sum was budgeted last year.

The ministry’s museums department spent an additional 33.3 million pesetas ($290,000) restoring the house of the painter El Greco, the Transito and the Santa Cruz museum. The regional government spent 70.1 million pesetas ($609,000).

These amounts, De Mesa says, are but a drop in the bucket.

The foundation is in the process of drawing up the first overall plan to present to the Ministry of Culture on what has to be done to establish what Bartholomew calls “the very fine balance between a museum city and a city that lives.”