The City of Alcalá de Henares, birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes, was named a World Heritage site by UNESCO , in recognition of the fact that Alcalá was the first city to be designed and built solely as the seat of a university, and was to serve as the model for other centres of learning in Europe and America.

Alcalá de Henares has witnessed many civilizations in the last 5.000 years. Each of them made a generous contribution to the city’s rich heritage. The Historical Centre began to develop from the Middle Ages and became an area in which Jews, Moslems and Christians lived together peacefully. The creation of the University, founded by Cardinal Cisneros in 1499, resulted in a great expansion of art and culture during the Renaissance and the Golden Age.

UNESCO's declaration not only refers to Alcalá's breathtaking historical heritage, but also to its contribution to the intellectual development of humankind, the advances in linguistics that took place there and, not least, to the definition of the Spanish language, specially through the work of its great son Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, and his masterpiece Don Quixote.