Castillo de La Calahorra

Archaeological excavation has confirmed that an Andalusi fortress occupied the hill before the Renaissance building went up on it. Walls of its towers and of a bastion survive, together with two small water tanks and part of a curtain wall, and the concentration of roof tile and lime mortar inside the primitive enclosure makes it very probable that the fortress held a small population. The flat-topped hill rises to 1,250 metres in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and its highest ground commands the lands of the Marquesado and their communications.

The lordship behind the castle was a mayorazgo founded in the Cenete by Cardinal Mendoza in favour of his son, don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar y Mendoza, first marqués del Cenete and conde del Cid. The second title came from his possession of the fortress of the mythical Cid Campeador at Jadraque; Rodrigo declared himself the Cid's successor and took his surnames. The cardinal's illegitimate son raised his castle-palace at the southern end of the plateau, the point from which the surrounding territory could best be watched.

The project appears to have taken shape during the journey Rodrigo made to Italy between 1506 and 1508, when he is thought to have commissioned and obtained the first plans and the designs for the decoration of his castle. Part of the stonework of the Arab fortress already on the hill was taken up into the new fabric, while materials, techniques and artists were brought in from Italy. The original design of the building is not now known. Direction of the works went first to the Segovian architect Lorenzo Vázquez, who fell out with the marqués del Cenete and gave way to the Genoese Michele Carlone.

Carlone began in his own workshop in Genoa, shipping Carrara marble already carved to the port of Almería, and afterwards took charge at the castle itself to oversee the assembly and the work in local materials. The decoration was completed in the years 1509 to 1512. La Calahorra is reckoned the first work of any scale in Spain in which the hand of Italian artists is documented, and the mixed origins of the carvers, Lombard, Genoese and Carraran, account for the differences of style in its ornament; even so the decoration holds a surprising unity that the parallel case of the castle of Vélez-Blanco does not.

La Calahorra was an anachronism at the moment it was built. The monarchy was then ordering fortresses pulled down, to consolidate its own presence before the people and to stop the old feudal nobility perpetuating its ties, and those orders carried an exception for the powerful military house of the Mendoza. The lower gallery of the courtyard once bore a Latin inscription recording that the first marqués, don Rodrigo de Mendoza, ordered this house built in 1510, in his thirty-seventh year; not for his own solace, the text ran, but under a compulsory and unjust idleness, withdrawn to this hill on fleeing our unhappy Hesperia, while it was not permissible even to think of seeking anything else. The lines refer to the harassment the crown was directing at the old feudal nobility to finish its privileges for good, the same pressure that also accounts for the tight schedule on which the fortress was executed.

Outwardly the building is a sober military mass, quadrangular, with a half-roofed wall-walk that kept the guard out of the weather, an artillery emplacement on the block set against the west front, and a single entrance at the north-east angle. The monumental staircase at the centre of the west range told a different story: its construction obliged the builders to enlarge the perimeter of the fortress, cancelling much of its defensive capacity and showing that the frankly military character of the castle-palace had already passed to second place.

An inventory of Rodrigo's library, drawn up by the governor of Valencia, ran to 632 volumes, much of it inherited from his father the cardinal and weighted towards Greek and Latin classics alongside literature, treatises on architecture and the philosophy of Italian Renaissance authors. That humanist formation reads across the decoration of the courtyard, from the psalm texts in the entablature to the Hercules Farnese and Apollo carved on the doorway of the Salón de los Marqueses.

Rodrigo de Mendoza and María de Fonseca lived in the finished castle for only eight years, and it then passed by inheritance to his daughters. The arms of the Fonseca, the family of Rodrigo's second wife, crown the entrance portal.

The castle recovered a real importance during the Rebellion of the Alpujarras, the War of the Moriscos of 1568 to 1571, which was fought with particular violence in the marquesado del Cenete. It served as a refuge for those who declared themselves Old Christians and as quarters for the marqués de Mondéjar. Afterwards it was abandoned for centuries.

Early in the twentieth century the castle came close to being sold and shipped to the United States, before passing instead to its last private owner. It was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural on 7 December 1922 and holds that protection still. The doorway of the oratory is now in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Seville.

The castle found steady work on screen, appearing in Doctor Zhivago in 1965, in the distance to the left of the train in the opening minutes of For a Few Dollars More, and prominently in The Wind and the Lion in 1975; it stood in for the retreat of Jim MacLaine, played by David Essex, in the 1974 film Stardust, and for a manse in the city of Pentos in the 2022 television series House of the Dragon.

In April 2025 the Diputación de Granada bought the castle for more than 6.5 million euros, and opened it to the public five months later, in September, with free guided visits of forty minutes on Fridays and Saturdays; every ticket for the first weekend was taken. Rather than keep it closed for the three or four years of adaptation works, the provincial council chose to open it quickly after the purchase and to restore it by degrees.