Loarre Castle

Loarre sits on a limestone promontory at the point where the Pyrenees give way to the plain of the Hoya de Huesca, commanding the passes of Arguis and Riglos and, below, Bolea — the principal Muslim stronghold of the district and the place that controlled its rich farmland. The rock itself serves as the foundation, so the walls could not be undermined, the usual method of breaking a fortress by tunnelling beneath a wall until it collapsed. Roman coins found on the site have prompted the suggestion that the castle went up over the settlement of Calagurris Fibularia.

It was raised for Sancho Garcés III of Pamplona, Sancho the Great, as a Navarrese frontier post from which attacks on Bolea were organised: begun around 1020 by one reckoning, between 1033 and 1035 by another. To that first campaign belong the royal building, the chapel, the Torre de la Reina, the parade ground, the service and military quarters and the keep. A lord is on record by March 1033, when Lope Sánchez appears as señor in Luar; under Ramiro I the tenancy was held by Fortuño Aznárez until 1062, interrupted in 1054 by Lope Garcés.

After 1070 Loarre mattered more, not less. Sancho Ramírez enlarged the complex in the early 1070s and installed a community of Augustinian canons, in step with his dealings with the papacy; on 17 October 1071 Pope Alexander II took San Pedro de Loarre under his protection, on the introduction of the Roman rite there and at San Juan de la Peña and San Victorián. It was from Loarre that the king prepared the conquest of Huesca.

His son Peter I moved the head of the congregation to a new royal monastery at Montearagón, making over the goods of Loarre to it in 1097, and the castle lost its monastic character. The clearing of the Muslims out of La Hoya took its military purpose away as well, and its influence went with it. The second building programme is placed between 1073 and 1097, and much of the fabric does belong to those years, though the decorative work plainly ran on into the twelfth century.

Peter II pawned the villages of Bolea and Loarre to the noble Pedro de Ahonés to meet his military costs. Ahonés already controlled Sobrarbe and later added Tauste by grant of James I; after his rebellion and death the villages came back to the crown once the rising was put down.

From at least 1263 the tenancy lay with the commander of the Order of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, and still did under Peter III, who granted it to Fernando, abbot of Montearagón, during the war against the Union. In the middle of 1287 the castle was sacked by Pedro de Ayerbe, one of the leaders of that party; after his death his widow and son had to pay the villagers a large sum for the damage done while his men were inside. The outer wall and its towers are dated to 1287, and more loosely by other accounts to the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Under James II the castle was held by Blasco Pérez de Azlor until his death, then by Pedro Fernández de Bergua.

In the revolt of the Count of Urgell the fortress served the Urgellist side, and it saw action in the siege of 1413, when the abbess Violante de Luna defended it fiercely and was beaten by the royal party all the same. In the fifteenth century the people living at the foot of the rock moved down to the site of the present village of Loarre, reusing material from the fortress as they built.

Loarre was declared a national monument on 5 March 1906 and carries the status of bien de interés cultural in the category of monument. Restoration has come in waves: a major campaign in 1913, work in the 1940s that lost most of the Pantocrator carved in the tympanum of the castle door, and a heavy programme in the 1970s that rebuilt walls and towers which had fallen into disrepair. Apart from the older Navarrese portion, which is far more decayed, the complex is in fair condition, and is reckoned the best-preserved Romanesque fortress in Europe. Regional and county bodies would like to see it put forward for UNESCO World Heritage listing.

It is open to visitors, and film crews have used it steadily: Valentina in 1982, Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven in 2005, for which the village of Loarre supplied extras, Miguel y William in 2006, and the television series El Ministerio del Tiempo, where the castle stands in for a prison.