Olmillos de Sasamón Castle

The Castle of Olmillos de Sasamón stands in Olmillos de Sasamón, Spain, and was raised by Castilian patrons in the fifteenth century.

In 1446 Pedro de Cartagena, a municipal magistrate from Burgos, commissioned the building as a leisure palace rather than as a purely military work. Pedro had acquired the local lordship after buying it from Diego Gómez de Sandoval, who had received that holding from King Juan II. Around 1440 Pedro established the Cartagena majorazgo that encompassed Olmillos, and he is recognized as the site’s founding patron.

By 1540 work on the nearby parish church of the Assumption was under way, and at that moment the residence received a rectangular tower intended for use as a stable or storage area. This addition completed the complex then understood as both a small fortress and a seigneurial house.

The estate passed by marriage from the Cartagena family into the Valoria line through Ángela Rodríguez Mausiño and Manuel Franco de Guzmán. In the early nineteenth century ownership moved again when Jacoba Giráldez married Mauricio Álvarez de Bohorques, the second Duke of Gor, and the castle came under the ducal household.

During the Peninsular War French forces occupied Burgos and the nearby town of Sasamón. In 1811 the Cortes of Cádiz suppressed feudal lordships by decree, and the dukes of Gor left the fortress neglected. In 1812 the building was abandoned after the guerrillero Santos Padilla set a fire that destroyed furniture and damaged part of the structure.

After the Napoleonic period much of the former patrimony was sold. Around 1815 Rosario, Viscountess of Valoria, disposed of large portions of the estate and the Arteche family acquired many properties, with the castle and local holdings adjudicated to Elisa Arteche Villabaso. Near the end of the twentieth century the San José family purchased the fortress and began a staged rehabilitation around 1989, employing reinforced concrete and a white stone finish for some repairs and for reconstructed battlements. In 2003 Jusef Nasser Eddin took ownership and carried out a second restoration lasting about two years with a budget near three million euros. That program used local stone and lime-and-cement mortars to consolidate the fabric, adapt the building for hospitality use, and complete work that led to the site’s inauguration in spring 2005.