Castle of Xabier

The Basque name Xabier comes from the longer Etxeberri, 'new house', which shifted through Navarro-Aragonese into Xavier and Spanish into Javier. The oldest fabric on the hill is dated to the 10th century, and Muslim work has been identified in the footings of the Tower of Homage — the San Miguel tower, the earliest part of the site — possibly of that same century. An enclosing wall went up in the 11th century, sheltering the first ranges of rooms, and in the 13th two polygonal blocks and two flanking towers were added on the four sides. The Tower of the Santo Cristo, the main fortified building, served as both bastion and chapel and holds a late Gothic crucifix and a series of dance-of-death wall paintings unique in Spain.

Castle and village came to Sancho VII of Navarre around 1223 through an unpaid debt. An Aragonese noble had borrowed 9,000 sols from the Navarrese king and put Xavier up as security; when the term expired and he could not pay, the stronghold passed to Sancho. It was neither the first such acquisition nor the last, for Sancho VII was among the great creditors of the Crown of Aragon, and the villages and castles he took in place of repayment — Escó, Peña, Petilla, Gallur, Trasmoz, Sádaba and others — notably strengthened his frontier with Aragon. In 1236 King Theobald I handed Xavier to Adán de Sada.

At the time of the Spanish conquest of Navarre the castle and village were held as a fief by María de Azpilcueta, a native of the Baztan valley, and her husband Juan de Jaso — Joanes Jatsukoa in Basque. Their son Francis Xavier was born and raised here as a child of the lords of Xavier, and took from the place the surname he would carry as a missionary. The family stood for the independence of the kingdom, and for that reason the Spanish regent Cardinal Cisneros ordered the castle demolished outright in 1516.

The order was not carried out in full: what followed was a slighting of the strong part. The wall that ringed the site, finished with battlements and loopholes, was thrown down; the ditch was filled in level with the field; two great gateways were destroyed and two round towers demolished; the drawbridge went, and inside the wall the garden and the rabbit warren were razed. The Tower of Homage of San Miguel was cut to half its height.

Successive inheritances carried the castle, with the rest of the village, to the House of Villahermosa. By the close of the 19th century it was practically a ruin, and its owners — María del Carmen de Aragón-Azlor, duchess of Villahermosa, and her husband José Manuel de Goyeneche, count of Guaqui — set restoration work going. The count died suddenly and without issue in 1893, which put the work in danger for lack of funds. His siblings, the marquis of Villafuerte, the duchesses of Goyeneche and Gamio and José Sebastián de Goyeneche, answered with notarial deeds of 30 April 1894 and 9 March 1895 recognising the duchess's life interest in the whole of her husband's estate so that she could meet the cost of works already begun; given the scale of them, each of the siblings also put in money of their own.

The programme ran beyond the castle to a basilica built against it, houses for priests and retreat houses. The architect was Ángel Goicoechea Lizarraga and the work was carried out by Blas Morte, a contractor from Tudela. Those who paid for it lie in the basilica crypt: the duchess, the count of Guaqui, and his siblings María Josefa, duchess of Goyeneche, Carmen, duchess of Gamio, and José Sebastián de Goyeneche y Gamio, founder of the Fundación Goyeneche. At the turn of the twentieth century the duchess gave castle and basilica to the Society of Jesus, on condition that they be kept as she handed them over; the order intended to make the place a missionary centre.

The Society of Jesus still owns the castle, and the San Miguel tower houses a museum devoted to the life of the saint. The site was protected by heritage decree from 1949 and declared a bien de interés cultural in February 1994, and it forms part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. Every year in early March it draws a mass pilgrimage in honour of the patron saint of Navarre, known locally as the Javierada.