Castle of Santa Catalina

The earliest signs of occupation on the Cerro de Santa Catalina are Bronze Age pottery from the northern slope and the summit, too slight to show what kind of settlement left them. The first defences belong to the Iberian period: cyclopean remains on the northern slope of an oppidum linked to the nearby site of Puente Tablas, whose population it is thought to have absorbed after that settlement was first abandoned at the turn of the 4th and 3rd centuries BC. The hill's properly military function dates from the Carthaginian period, when Hannibal built a substantial fortress to protect the Carthaginian colony he founded in the city, an installation the Romans kept and reinforced after their conquest. A tower known as Hannibal's Tower once occupied the ground the parador was later built on, and some traces of it are left.

From the 8th century the Umayyads raised a new fortified enclosure on the summit, enlarged in stages until it reached its greatest size between the 12th and 13th centuries. It was not alone on the ridge, 820 m up on a spur of the Sierra de Jabalcuz: an older fortress, the Alcázar Viejo, held the ground where the parador was later put up, and a third enclosure, the Abrehuí, also belongs to the 12th and 13th centuries. The three together make up the defensive complex of the Castillo de Jaén.

The Nasrid ruler of the Emirate of Granada, Abdallah ibn al-Ahmar, who also built the Alhambra, improved the fortress. Jayyan was by then an important stopping place for caravans headed for Madrid, and the castle may have been used to house travelling parties.

Ferdinand III of Castile took Jaén from Al-Ahmar of Granada in 1246, after the Siege of Jaén, and began the transformation of the castle, including the New Castle - the Alcázar Nuevo - at the eastern extreme of the hill. The bulk of the work fell to the reigns of Alfonso X and Ferdinand IV. The builders used some of the towers and ramparts of the old fortress and destroyed or replaced others. There are five towers and a donjon, one of the towers holding the Chapel of Saint Catherine, Gothic work of the 13th and 14th centuries, which gave the castle the name of the patron saint of Jaén.

Reforms driven in the 15th century by the Constable of Castile, Miguel Lucas de Iranzo, joined the Alcázar Nuevo to the Abrehuí, until then separated by an open esplanade, and finished with the building of the donjon, the Torre del Homenaje, a square tower 15.45 m to a side and more than 30 m high, among the last structures of the medieval campaign. In 1529 10,000 maravedís had to be spent on urgent work at the castle.

The 17th century brought some interior remodelling of the buildings. When Napoleon's troops reached Jaén in the early 19th century they rebuilt the castle around their own needs: part of a cistern was destroyed to make room for a gunpowder store, two rooms served as stables, and the French added a hospital, pavilions for the governor, offices, a kitchen and an artillery platform. On leaving the city they blew up the castle so that other troops could not use it, and little beyond the foundations is left of most of their work.

A decree of 3 June 1931 declared the castle a historic-artistic monument, the designation it carries as a bien de interés cultural. Jaén town council bought it in 1948 and has owned it since. In 1965 a Parador Nacional de Turismo designed by José Luis Picardo was built over the remains of the other two fortresses; the works destroyed many elements of the Old Castle and wrecked archaeological levels beyond recovery, masonry reinforcement hiding others. Of the original fortress only a few remnants are left, at the western end of the hill, and of the three enclosures only the Alcázar Nuevo is preserved. Charles de Gaulle stayed in the parador while writing his memoirs, and by 1983 it housed an 80-bed hotel.

The castle is open as a visitable monument, with an interpretive display set inside the towers of the Alcázar Nuevo, and on Saint Catherine's day, 25 November, the custom in Jaén is to walk up to the castle and grill sardines. At the highest point above the city is a monumental cross recalling the one Ferdinand III had erected there after taking the fortress; the present cross was a gift of the Balguerías family, and at its foot the stonemason Antonio Prieto engraved Antonio Almendros Aguilar's "Sonnet to the Cross".