Butrón

The origins of the building lie in the Middle Ages, when the site at Gatika in Biscay carried the casa-torre of the Butrón lineage. In the fifteenth century the guerras banderizas, the feuds between rival Basque bands, and the defensive demands that came with them drove a boom in fortified houses across the Basque country; the ending of those conflicts saw almost all of them shorn of their upper works or remodelled.

Butrón was altered across the centuries that followed, and its conversion into a farming household degraded its architecture: sheds and other additions accumulated until its medieval form was masked beneath the look of an ordinary rural house.

The castle's present shape is the work of Francisco de Cubas, the Marqués de Cubas, who began an almost complete rebuilding in 1878. With the accumulated additions stripped away, he worked from the surviving foundations and part of the cylindrical towers, combining references to older buildings with a large dose of fantasy in the manner of the nineteenth-century Bavarian castles, far from the tower-houses and castles native to the region. The keep resembles that of the Alcázar of Segovia, and the roofs were laid with slate. A backwater of the Butrón river rings the whole ensemble as a perimeter moat, crossed by a bridge to reach the castle.

The work was conceived as a pastime for its owner and as a visual spectacle rather than as somewhere anyone would live, and it makes an awkward house: the towers hold little useful space, and some rooms connect by open-air walkways and stairs, which suit the wet Basque weather poorly.

The castle fell into disuse, was later renovated and opened to the public, and when that proved unsuccessful the building was closed to visitors while the grounds stayed open. For a time it was fitted out as a hospitality venue with medieval-themed entertainments, and was afterwards seized and put up for auction. In November 2005 it was bought by the INBISA business group for 1,629,743 euros, and in December 2021 sold on to a Russian couple settled in Barcelona for four million euros.

Butrón is a declared historic property, covered by the general protection of Spanish law 16/1985 on historic buildings and registered by the Basque government as a heritage site. The wooded park of native and exotic species around it, more than 35,000 square metres of grounds, has been left abandoned.