Castle of Almodóvar del Río

Before any castle, the ground Almodóvar occupies probably carried an Ibero-Turdetanian settlement, generally identified with the Cárbula that Pliny the Elder names — a fortified oppidum of some standing. It may have served as an embarkation point on the Guadalquivir for the produce of the campiña, oil and grain, and an important pottery industry grew up around it; silver was possibly worked in the neighbourhood, and by the second century BC the place was striking its own coin. A Roman fort followed on the same ground.

The fortress that gave the town its name was raised by the Umayyads in the mid-eighth century — dated 740 by some accounts and 760 by others — and called al-Mudawar, the round or the safe, a name that wore down over time to Almodóvar. Through the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries the castle and its district belonged to the Emirate and then the Caliphate of Córdoba, standing fifteen miles from the capital on the left bank of the Guadalquivir.

The eleventh century broke that arrangement into pieces. Almodóvar was attached first to the taifa of Carmona and then to that of Seville; the Almoravids returned it to Córdoban jurisdiction; and in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it answered to the Almohad court at Seville.

Almodóvar came to Castile in 1240, incorporated by agreement under Ferdinand III rather than taken by assault, and three years later the king handed it to the council of Córdoba. In 1267 Alfonso X fixed the boundary between Almodóvar and neighbouring Posadas. Pedro I lodged in the castle in 1360, and his half-brother Enrique II stayed there repeatedly; through the fifteenth century the keeping of the place was tied to the House of Baena and Cabra.

In 1513 Almodóvar and its castle were pledged as security for the purchase of Fuente Obejuna, but the town came back into the crown's hands. It held realengo status — royal jurisdiction, exercised through the city of Córdoba — until 1629, when Philip IV consented to the sale of the town. The buyer was Francisco del Corral y Guzmán, a knight of the Order of Santiago, and Almodóvar passed from crown land to a seigneurial holding.

Restoration began in 1901 under the castle's owner, Rafael Desmassières y Farina, Count of Torralva, with the architect Adolfo Fernández Casanova directing the technical work. Neither man saw it finished — the count died in 1914, Fernández Casanova in 1932 — and the works ran on until 1936, when the outbreak of the Civil War stopped them.

The castle and the Desmassières titles were inherited by a great-nephew of the count, the Andalusian banker Fernando de Solís Beaumont y Atienza, tenth Marquess of la Motilla, and since 2001 it has belonged to his son Miguel Ángel de Solís y Martínez Campos. It was declared a bien de interés cultural in June 1985. In November 2016 the seventh season of Game of Thrones filmed here, the castle standing in for Highgarden, seat of House Tyrell, with a scene shot in its dungeons doubling for the underground of Casterly Rock.