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This Province is honoured by the fact that it is the Province of two great saints of the Church: Teresa of Jesus and John of the Cross. It was founded in 1416, when the Province of Spain was split into the two Provinces of Aragon and Castile. It was this Province which preserved the title and location of the ancient Province of Spain up to 1469. It included the convents of Toledo, Requena, Avila, Salamanca, San Pablo de la Moraleja, Santa Maria de los Valles, Gibraleon, Seville and Escacena, and, a little later, Ecija. In 1498 the four last mentioned houses were separated from Castile to form the new Province of Andalusia (Betica). The same thing had happened previously in 1425 when the convents of Moura and Lisbon, which belonged to Castile, gave rise to the Province of Portugal.

The Province remained relatively small, a situation which led St. Teresa to say that it was about to disappear. But later events have shown that the fear of St. Teresa was not well-founded, for in the years 1550-1557, the Prior General, Nicholas Audet, had included the Province among those which had accepted completely his reform, and which consequently grew in number of convents and religious, and, during the closing decades of the XVIIth century and through the following century, enjoyed its period of grand splendour. In the schools of the Province, which were affiliated to the Universities of Toledo, Salamanca, Alcala de Henares and Valladolid, many religious flourished in wisdom and virtue. Among these we recall especially the great mystic, Miguel de la Fuente and the great theologians, Pedro Cornejo de Pedrosa, Juan Bautista de Lezana and Luis Pérez de Castro. This Province, which through the centuries has given to the Order two Priors General, Juan González Feijoo de Villalobos (1692-1698) and Manuel Regidor y Brihuega (1825-1831), and fourteen bishops to the Church, also included the monasteries of nuns in Avila, Fontiveros and Piedrahita, founded at the end of the XVth and the beginning of the XVIth centuries. There were also two more monasteries of nuns founded in the XVIIth century in Madrid.

As was the case with all religious in Spain, the Province of Castile was suppressed by the government in 1835. The restoration of the Province began in 1948, when the Commissariat of Castile was established with houses in El Henar, Salamanca and Lomas de Zamora (Argentina). To these were added the houses in Madrid and Valladolid. The monasteries of nuns in Madrid (Maravillas), Piedrahita and Fontiveros, which managed to survive the decree of exclaustration, also belonged to the Commissariat. In 1984, Castile regained its status as a Province.

from January 2013 the two Provinces of Germany merged into one province called
German Province

The earliest extant Constitutions of the Carmelite Order, those of 1281, already show a German Province, eighth in precedence of ten Provinces. By 1294 it had been divided into the Lower and Upper German Provinces. During the first half of the 14th century the two Provinces were several times reunited and divided, probably because of the differences between Louis of Bavaria and the papacy, but in 1348 the division became definitive. The Province of Lower Germany extended over the Rhineland, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

The Province with its principal convent in Cologne suffered less from the Reformation than its sister Province, and in Eberhard Billick, its Provincial, it provided the Church with an outstanding champion of the Catholic faith. The Thirty Years War delayed the revival of the Province, but at the cessation of hostilities it became possible to introduce the Stricter Observance, especially through the efforts of Antonin de la Charité, of the province of Touraine. By 1660 the Province had become completely reformed.

The sixteen convents of this flourishing province vanished without a trace in the Napoleonic suppression of 1803 and subsequently. Only in 1924, when the Province of The Netherlands repossessed our ancient church in Mainz, did a Carmelite presence return to these regions. Other foundations followed, and in 1969 the Lower Germany Province again became a reality. It has a mission in Camerun.

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