Castillo de Cuevas de Almanzora

The castle stands as an irregular rectangular walled enclosure with a single entrance facing the Plaza de la Libertad, and the gate displays the coats of arms of the Fajardo family. The enclosure sits on raised ground that was once cut by a deep moat, and the overall grouping forms a central patio with attached buildings that reflect successive phases of military and domestic use.

The torre del homenaje occupies the eastern wall and measures roughly 16 by 19 metres. It rises in five storeys linked by a spiral staircase and presents a truncated pyramidal silhouette on a rectangular footprint. The tower still retains almost all of the corbels that once supported an overhanging parapet with a rounded profile. Beneath some of the rectangular windows there are circular artillery embrasures, evidence of adaptation for gunpowder weapons. The tower was put to use as a prison in the seventeenth century and some prisoner graffiti remains visible on its interior walls.

The surrounding defensive wall was rebuilt in the early sixteenth-century program and is notable for the many embrasures arranged along its length, which were designed to accommodate a garrison’s firearms. The wall encloses the palace buildings and links several towers and bastions that reinforce the circuit.

The marquis’s palace is a two-storey ashlar building set within the enclosure and flanked by four cylindrical bastions. Numerous rooms open onto a central patio, and a terrace with broad merlons capped by spherical ornaments connects to the keep through a lowered arch. Inside the palace a large hall is formed by semicircular arches carried on columns with plant-motif capitals, an arrangement that reflects its early sixteenth-century reconstruction as a residence and fortress combined.

Attached to the right side of the enclosure, beside the wall and the main tower, stands the rectangular alcaide’s house with rounded corners created by conical buttresses. Additional domestic units were added on the left side of the patio and in the buildings surrounding the central courtyard, documenting the continued residential use of the complex through the Ancien Régime.

A deep moat surrounds the raised platform on which the castle sits and is crossed by a bridge that dates to the same rebuilding phase associated with the marquis’s interventions. The Casa de la Tercia occupies the west side; this large neoclassical granary bears a plaque with the date 1773 and was built to store grain and receive tithes. Today the Casa de la Tercia contains the municipal library, the local archaeological museum and an exhibition hall called La Tercia I. An annex, Tercia II, is a glazed hall that displays numerous semi-buried jars and a permanent collection of Goya prints known as the Sala Goya. The various buildings open onto the Patio de Armas, a tree-lined plaza that includes a small amphitheatre and organizes the castle’s public and cultural facilities.