Alcazaba of Badajoz

Abd-al Rahman Ibn Marwan founded Batalyaws, the modern Badajoz, in 875, in the reign of the Córdoban emir Muhammad I and over an earlier Visigothic settlement. Having led several rebellions he was barred from returning to Mérida but permitted to found a new city; he asked for the hill of San Cristóbal and was allowed to build only on the Cerro de la Muela, on the left bank of the Guadiana. The citadel he raised there, originally of mortar, commanded the new town and gave Badajoz a strategic part in controlling the passage from Portugal to central Iberia.

The first restoration was carried out in rammed earth in 913 by his grandson Abd Allah ibn Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman. In 1030 Abdallah Ibn el-Aftas, first king of the Aftasid line, rebuilt the enceinte in stone and lime, and through the 11th and 12th centuries the alcazaba served as the residence of the rulers of the taifa of Badajoz.

The walls that survive are mostly Almohad work: shortly after 1169, under the caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf, the fortress was rebuilt into the form it now keeps, with traces of the 913 and 1030 campaigns still legible in the fabric. Its builders reused pieces of Roman and Visigothic work, capitals and columns among them, as reinforcement and as decoration. The chief albarrana tower, the octagonal Espantaperros or Torre de la Atalaya at the south-western angle, rises 30 metres and is reckoned the forerunner of Seville's Torre del Oro; the small body crowning its terrace is a Mudéjar addition of the 16th century.

The last known Muslim restoration was the governor Abu Yahya ibn Abi Sinan's, in the opening years of the 13th century, a few years before Alfonso IX of León took the city.

After the Christian conquest the largest of the palace mosques, the Great Mosque, became the church of Santa María de Calatrava and served as the cathedral of Badajoz until the present cathedral was built; it had five naves divided by arches on columns, with external buttresses. The military hospital, another converted building of the Muslim palace, still stands within the walls. The Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, Lorenzo Suárez de Figueroa (1387–1410), built a ducal palace inside the citadel, Renaissance in style with Mudéjar elements and restored in the 17th century.

The citadel measures 400 by 200 metres, bounded on the north by the Guadiana and on the east by the Rivillas torrent, its towers set to defend the gentler stretches of slope. Two artillery batteries were installed on the wall-walk beside the Torre del Pendón in the 17th century; the gun embrasures of the first are still marked out in brick on the walk's floor, and the second keeps its artillery platform and merlons altered to take cannon. The Torre de la Horca served as a powder store and, with the Torre de las Siete Ventanas, as a place of execution. In the winter storms of 1762–63 a landslip brought down some 50 metres of wall between the Torre de las Siete Ventanas and its neighbour; the breach was repaired in 1763 in the angled form of a fusiliers' wall, able to cover two fronts and hold the earth banked behind it.

During the Peninsular War of 1807–1814 the citadel was successfully stormed by allied British, Spanish and Portuguese forces under the Duke of Wellington. The Napoleonic hold on western Spain was significantly weakened as a result. The Arab wall beside El Metido was destroyed during the war; the French, once they had taken the city, rebuilt that stretch further out and gave it an earth terrace in place of a wall-walk.

The whole walled circuit was declared a historic-artistic monument by decree of 3 June 1931. The ducal palace, declared a monument in its own right in 1962, houses the Provincial Archaeological Museum, and the former military hospital now holds the Library of Extremadura together with the University of Extremadura's Faculty of Documentation and Communication Sciences. Its Arab-period enclosure — about eight hectares within some 1,300 metres of surviving wall — is reckoned the largest alcazaba in Europe.

The corachas, protective walls running out from the ramparts to give safe access to the water of the Guadiana in time of siege or danger, were mutilated and their gates pulled down to build the ring road, their stone crushed for the roadbed. Rehabilitation work stripping the French earth terrace at El Metido uncovered the buried Arab wall, whose original line has been marked out on the ground in gravel.