ABSTRACT
Salamanca is a city in Spain, capital of the province of the same name, located in the region of Castilla y Leon, in the Spanish North Plateau. The historic town of Salamanca was designated as a World Heritage Site by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 1988. It is a unique city with many monuments and historical buildings made of local natural stones, from sedimentary to igneous rocks that were extracted in quarries nearby. Several buildings and monuments of Salamanca city and province show the degree of destruction that the battles could provoke in what is called cultural heritage. The widespread use of local stone by the most prominent architects of the time to build Salamanca’s historic buildings has contributed to the fact that Villamayor sandstone was designated as Global Heritage Stone Resource by the Heritage Stones Subcommission of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) after following a strict evaluation protocol.
