Castle of Lorca

Excavations on the castle hill and across the town below have shown the crag settled without a break from prehistory, and uncovered an Argaric town of the Bronze Age, with burials, houses and the footings of its protecting wall, spreading beneath the castle and the modern city. With a Bronze Age rampart established on the hill, the date at which a defensive work first stood there has not been determined.

The first written notice of a castle at Lorca comes from Muslim sources, which by the 9th century name Lurqa among the most important towns of the Cora of Tudmir, the district of seven cities ruled by Theudimer and listed in the Treaty of Orihuela, preserved by the Andalusian historian Ibn Adarí in the 13th century. Under Islamic rule the steepness of the hill made the fortress an impregnable one, and its interior was divided in two by the wall known as the muro del Espaldón, with the alcazaba proper to the west and, to the east, the barrio de Alcalá of the Muslim medina. Further circuits ran down from the castle walls to enclose the suburbs and markets on the slopes below.

Lorca was taken in 1244 by the Castilian Infante Don Alfonso, the future Alfonso X, and the fortress became the forward position facing the Nasrid kingdom. For more than 250 years it watched the border between the Christian kingdom of Murcia and the Muslim kingdom of Granada.

That position obliged the Castilian monarchs to repopulate the district and to maintain defences equal to it. Alfonso X granted houses in the alcázares and the town of Lorca to Christian settlers in perpetuity, and ordered the building of the Alfonsina and Espolón towers and of a third, the tower of Guillén Pérez de Pina, since lost, along with the strengthening of the walls and the rebuilding of those that had been damaged. The Alfonsina was raised at the highest point of the hill on the foundations of a more modest Islamic tower, levelled to make way for it. The Christian rebuilding went so far that little of the Muslim castle survives beyond the muro del Espaldón and some footings of the present walls. The barrio de Alcalá, inside the castle, took new settlers after the conquest.

The Jewish quarter of medieval Lorca lay within the alcazaba, separated from the rest of the city by its walls. The separation was intended to protect its inhabitants, but it also divided the town along ethnic lines, leaving the Christians in the lower part and the Jews in the more remote one. The quarter remained in use until the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, after which it stood empty.

Its remains, brought to light during the building of the parador, cover some 5,700 square metres; twelve houses and a synagogue have been excavated, the only synagogue found in the Region of Murcia. The synagogue stood at the centre of the quarter with the houses distributed around it, set partly into the ground so that it gained height inside without standing above its neighbours, which kept it within the laws of the period.

The frontier closed with the conquest of Almería in 1488 and of Granada in 1492, and the castle's importance fell away sharply; it was now far larger than the reduced garrison left to hold it required. The expulsion of the Jews decreed by the Catholic Monarchs removed the last inhabitants of the judería, and the barrio de Alcalá emptied completely. With the country safer, the town itself shifted onto the flatter ground of the valley and away from the castle. The fortress was abandoned altogether, and by the 18th century much of it was threatening ruin.

The opening of the 19th century brought it back into use for the War of Spanish Independence. Walls and rooms were repaired, while other works altered the medieval appearance completely, among them the battery built to bring artillery to bear on the Murviedro quarter and the stables set beneath it. On 4 June 1931 the castle, and the Alfonsina Tower in particular, was declared a National Historic Monument.

On 5 March 1964 the old town of Lorca, the fortress included, was declared a conjunto histórico-artístico, and the castle is listed as a bien de interés cultural. Three years of archaeological excavation accompanied the building of a parador inside the walled enclosure, and it was that work which uncovered the synagogue and the judería; the hotel design was adapted to take in the remains, though part of the scientific community opposed building within the walls at all.

The earthquake that struck Lorca on 11 May 2011 seriously damaged the curtain wall and the Espolón Tower, and delayed the hotel again, though the castle kept its summer programme and night visits running. The tower had been restored by the beginning of 2012, without the merlons that had characterised it, the architect directing the works, Francisco Jurado, citing a lack of historical evidence that they had existed. The parador was opened on 12 July 2012 by Queen Sofía. The walled complex is worked as a heritage site by Lorca Taller del Tiempo, and the excavated remains can be visited in the basement of the parador.