Template:On this day - July 20

Pancho Villa

• 1221 – In Spain the first stone of the new Cathedral of Burgos is laid.
• 1500 – In Spain, Isabella the Catholic decrees, by Royal Decree, the return to their lands of all the natives who had been taken prisoner by Christopher Columbus. A month earlier, by Royal Provision, she had decreed the freedom of all of them.
• 1700 – In Spain, King Charles II grants the status of villa to Fuente Álamo de Murcia.
• 1726 – Birth of Joaquín Ibarra, Spanish printer (d. 1785).
• 1737 – Birth of Nicolás Fernández de Moratín, Spanish poet, prose writer and playwright (d. 1780).
• 1754 – In Spain, King Ferdinand VI dismisses the Marquis of la Ensenada.
• 1808 – The invading French army of Joseph I Bonaparte enters Madrid (Spain).
• 1810 – In the Viceroyalty of New Granada the Act of the Extraordinary Cabildo of Santa Fe is signed, forerunner of the Act of Independence of Colombia.
• 1857 – In Tonkin (Cochinchina) Bishop José María Díaz Sanjurjo is murdered, which gave rise to the armed intervention of Spain, together with France.
• 1873 – The government of the First Spanish Republic issues a decree declaring pirates all the ships of the Spanish Navy that had supported the rebellion of the Canton of Cartagena.
• 1905 – Death of Alfonso Espínola, Spanish physician and professor who emigrated to Uruguay (b. 1845).
• 1908 – In Spain a Law is passed organizing the collection and exchange by the Ministry of Finance of the counterfeit duros circulating in the country.
• 1909 – In Spain, the inventor and builder Ricardo Causarás Casaña patents the world's first rigid delta-wing triangular airplane.
• 1923 – Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary, is assassinated in an ambush (b. 1878).
• 1927 – In Chile the executive decree is promulgated restoring, from October 12 of the same year, the teaching and official use in that country of the orthography of the Royal Spanish Academy in place of the Orthography of Andrés Bello, which had been in force since 1844.
• 1936 – General José Sanjurjo, who was to lead the military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, dies in a plane crash while returning from Lisbon to Madrid (b. 1872).
• 1960 – In Bogotá (Colombia), the Museum of July 20 is founded to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the country's independence.
• 1979 – The Spanish theater director Albert Boadella is granted provisional release.
• 2007 – In Spain, the Government seizes issue 1573 of the magazine El Jueves for publishing "denigrating" caricatures of the Princes of Asturias having sexual relations.
• 2015 – Cuba and the United States officially restore their diplomatic relations, which had been broken since 1961, putting an end to 54 years of hostility between the two nations.
• 2017 – Death of Wilindoro Cacique, Peruvian musician, singer-songwriter, composer and businessman (b. 1942).