The visual basin of Cerro de San Vicente is the first space in the city that becomes the landscape as such, as it is the starting point of Salamanca culture in its original sense. The landscape is nature passed through the filter of human culture.

Before the settlement of the Vettones on this promontory, the confluence between the valley at the foot of the hill and the banks of the Tormes river would be populated by an ash grove that shaded the lost stream. The slope itself and the hills we see on either side would be covered with broom, broom, and scrub oak in the rockier areas. Holm oaks would dominate the top of these hills (both San Vicente and the Faculty of Sciences and Congress Palace). More than 3000 years ago, it would be an uninhabited environment, where the ancestors of the Merino sheep and the Morucha cow grazed, which would already move from south to north and vice versa along what would later be the Cañada Real de la Plata.

In a natural environment similar to the one described, the Vettones settle and begin to transform the original forests into culture. Thus and here begins the history and tradition of Salamanca.