Castell de Besora

Castell de Besora stands in Santa Maria de Besora, Spain.

The place appears in written records in the late ninth century under the names castro Bisora and castro Bisaura, attested in 885 and 887 during the period of Wifredo el Velloso. In 898 Bishop Gomar consecrated two local churches, Santa María and San Quirico, at the request of Abbess Emma of the monastery of San Juan de Ripoll, and those parishes were subsequently incorporated into that monastery’s endowment. The first explicit documentary mention of the castle itself comes from 921, in a deed recording the sale to Abbess Emma of land that belonged to the castro Bisaura.

Civil authority over Besora belonged to the counts of Barcelona, who placed a knight with the title vicarius or veguer in charge of the territory and the fortress. The earliest named local lord is Ermemir, recorded in 975; surviving family details list his wife Ingilberga and a daughter, also called Ingilberga, who is recorded in connection with Count Oliba Cabreta and later became abbess of San Juan. During the twelfth century Ramon Berenguer IV entrusted several strongholds, among them Besora, to his great seneschal Guillem Ramon, and by 1201 a castellano called Gombau de Besora appears among the castle’s officers.

Members of the Besora family continued to be active in wider military and political events. A Guillermo de Besora took part in the conquest of Valencia in 1238 under King Jaime I. In 1243 Ramon de Besora settled a dispute with Ramon de Milany, and later generations of the two families intermarried. Royal intervention increased in the later thirteenth century when King Pedro the Great ordered in 1276 that the castle’s potestad be returned to Gastón de Moncada, vizcount of Bearne; by 1285 the king had reclaimed Besora and the nearby lordship of Curull for the crown.

Financial trouble brought a decisive loss of autonomy in 1329 when royal commissioners seized from the lord of Besora “all the honors, censuses and belongings” because of his disastrous finances. After that seizure possession alternated between the local lords of Besora and successive Catalan counts‑kings, with Pedro IV, Juan I, Martín I and Fernando I all named among those who held the place at various times. By the late nineteenth century physical decline was conspicuous; in 1892 Carreras y Candi recorded that the fabric had fallen into decay, noting that only the remains of the fortress and its church endured.