Burgalimar Castle

The rock above Baños de la Encina commands the town and the entrance to the Guadalquivir valley, and therefore to Andalusia. Excavations inside the walls have exposed one or two earlier walled enclosures belonging to a Bronze Age settlement, evidence for the Argaric culture, along with a 4th-century Iberian oppidum and a Roman mausoleum.

A marble slab found at the entrance carries the year 357 AH (967–968) and the name of the Córdoban caliph al-Hakam II. Acquired by the Real Academia de la Historia, it is now kept in the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. On the traditional Umayyad reading the castle belongs with a string of identical fortified enclosures the caliph ordered along the road running from the Sierra Morena to Córdoba; the chronicles of the period have them raised to quarter troops — largely Maghrebi mercenaries — moving north towards the castle of Gormaz in Soria to raid the Christian kingdoms. The line was not built for defence: the country was then in a long period of peace.

That founding date has since been rejected by A. Canto and I. Rodríguez Casanova, who hold the slab is not the foundation stone, and by excavations early in the present century placing the castle in the late 11th or early 12th century. The argument rests on the fabric: in Umayyad works such as Tarifa, Medina Azahara and the alcazaba of Mérida the towers are solid, the wall-walks do not project beyond the adjoining walls, and the lime-concrete rammed earth used at Baños does not appear — while a great many castles of the Almohad period use rammed earth very like it.

After the caliphate of Córdoba broke into taifa kingdoms in the 11th century the district became a battleground, the Christians established around Calatrava treating the nearby Sierra Morena passes as the key to Andalusia. Alfonso VII of León took the castle from the Muslims in 1147; after his death in 1157 it returned to Islamic hands. Alfonso VIII of Castile and Alfonso IX of León recovered it in 1189, and Castile held it shortly before the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 — but three days after that battle it was back under Almohad control.

It passed to Castile for good in 1225, in Ferdinand III's drive south. The king granted it to Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, archbishop of Toledo, and entrusted its defence and garrison to the Order of Santiago, then deep in the southern campaigns. Soon after, he placed the town of Baños de la Encina under the jurisdiction of Baeza, where it remained until 1626, when Baños became a villa in its own right. The castle is also known as the fortress of the seven kings — Alfonso VII, Alfonso VIII, Alfonso IX, Peter II, Sancho VII, Ferdinand III and Ferdinand the Catholic all stayed in it — and tradition holds that Ferdinand III was born within its walls in 1189.

In the 14th century the interior appears to have been reorganised, a small fort raised over the parade ground behind an inner wall; only its footings and fragments of one defensive wall remain. In 1458, amid the noble disputes of Castile, Henry IV granted the fortress to his constable, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo. The townspeople resented the decision and refused the change of jurisdiction, and in 1466 the regidor of Baeza took the castle and returned it to the king's supporters.

The Torre del Homenaje belongs to that moment, built around one of the original Muslim bastions and altering the profile of the whole fortress. Larger than the fourteen square caliphal-style towers that ring the oval enceinte — about 100 metres on its long axis, 46 on its short — it follows Christian rather than Andalusi canons, and it faces the town rather than the landscape, in the feudal manner a statement of its holder's power. The southern gate, between two high towers, keeps its two great horseshoe arches with a machicolation above; the northern entrance is a plainer affair.

During the Napoleonic invasion French troops took the castle over and it suffered from their occupation; from then until 1828 its courtyard served as the parish cemetery. Restoration work followed under the Dirección de Bellas Artes, and in 1931 the castle was declared a National Monument. It belongs today to the town council of Baños de la Encina, and since 1969 it has held the right, granted by the Council of Europe, to fly the European flag from its keep — a privilege it shares only with the castle of Florence. Little damaged by time or by human hand, it is reckoned among the best-preserved Muslim castles in Spain.