Atalaya Castle

The fortress was built in an unknown period, but not later than the 12th century, since Arab sources already mention it in 1172; it has been speculated, without proof, that it stands over an earlier Roman castrum or villa. Its inner walls were raised in the Almohad era, and the lower sections of the keep were built in the same period using the rammed-earth tapial technique; the keep's hall still carries an Almohad vaulted ceiling dated to the late 12th century.

As a stronghold on the northern frontier of the Islamic emirate of Iberia, the castle resisted three separate sieges laid by James I of Aragon before he took it in 1240, sending an army of Calatrava knights and almogavar mercenaries under Ruy Pérez Ponce de León, Commander of Alcañiz. The conquest breached the Treaty of Cazola, which had assigned Villena to Castile's zone of conquest, and the castle passed definitively to Castile under the Treaty of Almizra in 1244.

The Order of Calatrava held the castle only briefly before Infante Manuel of Castile acquired it on becoming lord of Villena. His son, the writer Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, resided there and had the fortress's defences improved to secure it, records say, for his fiancée, the Infanta Constanza of Aragon, daughter of James II of Aragon: Juan Manuel married her at the age of six and kept her in the castle until she turned twelve, when the marriage could be consummated.

In the 14th century the Manuel lords were succeeded by Alfonso of Aragon and Foix, the first Marquis of Villena, and in the following century Don Juan Pacheco, the second marquis, had the Almohad walls rendered over and the keep's two upper storeys added. In 1476, encouraged by the Catholic Monarchs, the townspeople of Villena rose against the marquess Diego López Pacheco; the revolt cost the lives of thousands of Jews and conversos who had taken refuge inside the castle. Afterwards neither city nor castle returned to the marquisate, which became an honorific title only, and both passed to the Crown.

During the Revolt of the Brotherhoods (1519–1523) the viceroy Diego Mendoza took refuge in the fortress after his defeat at Gandía, and the troops that set out from it retook Valencia from the rebels. In the War of the Spanish Succession, fifty Bourbon-loyalist soldiers held the castle through an eight-day siege by the bulk of the Austrian army. In 1811, during the Peninsular War, the forces of the French marshal Suchet looted the fortress and blew up the roof and vaults of the keep, destroying roughly a third of the surface of its Almohad ceilings; the castle was abandoned afterwards.

The castle was declared a Historical-Artistic Monument in 1931 and remains protected as a bien de interés cultural. Restoration began in 1958 with the rebuilding of the keep's roof and corner turrets; the walls around the parade ground were restored during the 1960s, and in 1971 the two towers flanking the entrance gate were rebuilt, with further small-scale works continuing since.

Since 1961 the fireworks that open the city's Moros y Cristianos festival have been launched from the castle, and since 1977 the festival's Moorish and Christian embassy re-enactments have been staged there; its surroundings were rehabilitated and the monument given night illumination in the 1990s.