Castle of la Muela

Consuegra is the Roman Consabura, a town that once carried the works of a large city — baths, walls, an aqueduct, a circus. The castle on the Cerro Calderico above it enters the written record through the Estoria de España compiled under Alfonso X in the thirteenth century, which holds that in Visigothic times the place belonged to Count Julián, named there as heir in the castle of Consuegra. The first rebuilding of the fortress may have been Almanzor's, in the tenth century, when the surrounding districts lay under Muslim rule; the circular albarrana tower at the south of the site, joined to the rest of the works by a wall-walk, is a defensive work of the Arab period.

In 1097 al-Mu'tamid ceded the castle to Alfonso VI under a marriage pact, the king taking the Sevillian princess Zaida to wife, and it was won without a war. The Christian hold was brief. In August of that same year Alfonso VI lost the fortress after his defeat at the battle of Consuegra, in which Diego Rodríguez, the only male child of the Cid, was killed fighting the Almoravids.

Christian forces took the site back in the twelfth century, and the Hospitallers rebuilt it across that century and the next. In 1183 the castle, the town and its dominions were granted to the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem — the gift is credited to Alfonso VIII in some accounts and to Alfonso VII in others. The Order made Consuegra the head of its priory of La Mancha and gave the fortress the shape it still holds; the features that matter most in the fabric are later than the donation, chiefly the expansions and restorations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. A hermitage was raised inside the walls in the late fifteenth century, and the gate carries the arms of a prior of the Order, Juan José de Austria, beside those of the Álvarez de Toledo.

In the reign of Alfonso XI the priorship of Saint John at Consuegra was held by Fernando Rodríguez de Valbuena, between 1328 and 1332. He appears in the ballad that opens “Don García de Padilla / ese que Dios perdonase…”, which praises the fortress in lines addressed to the king: there is a castle at Consuegra that has no equal in the world, better in your hands, king, than in the prior's. In the same ballad Diego García de Padilla, master of Calatrava and brother of doña María de Padilla, urges the king to have the prior murdered after a banquet, in the manner of the killing of Juan el Tuerto at Toro.

The French invasion and Napoleon's campaign in Spain came in 1808, and a French garrison held the castle from 1809 to 1813, wrecking it as they pulled out. The archives of the Order of Saint John, kept within the walls, were destroyed by the French. Mendizábal's disentailment of 1836 brought expropriation, and with it abandonment, fire and a long slide into ruin.

In 1962 the town council of Consuegra bought the castle and began a full restoration; the hermitage, the cisterns, the wall-walks, the chapter house, the albarrana tower, the terraces and the barbican can now be reached. In 2008 the whole of the Cerro Calderico, castle and windmills together, was declared a Bien de Interés Cultural under the protected status of historic site. It is reckoned among the best preserved castles in Castilla-La Mancha.