Montjuïc Castle

A medieval beacon tower that signalled the approach of ships was the first structure on the summit above Barcelona. The hill's name descends from mons judeiqus, for the cemetery of the city's medieval Jewish community, documented there at least from the ninth century to the fourteenth and abandoned after the destruction of the Call in 1391.

Fortification came in 1640, during the war against Philip IV: a quadrilateral of earth faced with stone and clay, thrown up in thirty days and improved by French engineers in January 1641. That provisional work saw its first battle on 26 January 1641, when it threw back the Castilian army of Pedro Fajardo, Marquis of los Vélez — 26,000 men sent to crush the Catalan revolt — with the Catalan defence led by Francesc de Tamarit. The dry-stone fort decayed and was pulled down in 1643; by 1651 a new one stood in its place, two square enclosures with bastions at the corners and a stockade outside.

In 1694 the fort was converted into a castle, with three bastions facing inland and a saw-toothed line of merlons facing the sea, the earlier work left as an inner redoubt. During the War of the Spanish Succession, on 17 September 1705, Charles Mordaunt, Lord Peterborough, took it for the Catalans, a capture that helped turn them towards the cause of the Archduke Charles and opened the way to the siege of Barcelona; Lieutenant-Colonel William Southwell, who led the British 6th Regiment of Foot in the assault, was afterwards made governor.

Philip V's forces recovered it on 25 April 1706 against seven hundred redcoats under Arthur Chichester, Lord Donegall, and the Catalans retook it on 12 May. It did not return to Bourbon hands until five in the afternoon of 12 September 1714, when the citizens of Barcelona surrendered it under the fifth article of the Capitulations imposed on the city that day by the Duke of Berwick.

Giovanni Antonio Medrano drew up designs for the castle in 1730, and in 1751 the military engineer Juan Martín Cermeño demolished the old fort of the Reapers' War and gave the fortifications the form they still hold: a star-shaped plan of bastions and outworks around a deep excavated moat, laid out to the systems of the French engineer Vauban. Works between 1779 and 1799 doubled the number of men it could house, added kitchens for 3,000 places and armed it with no fewer than 120 guns. In the same years it served as one of the vertices in the triangulation of the meridian through Dunkirk, Paris and Barcelona that fixed the length of the metre.

On 13 February 1808 Napoleonic troops under Guillaume Philibert Duhesme and Giuseppe Lechi entered Barcelona with 5,427 men and 1,830 horses. On 29 February a unit under Colonel Floresti climbed the hill and occupied the castle without a shot: the captain general of the Principality had orders from the Court to receive the French benevolently, and the garrison did not resist.

In 1842, during Espartero's regency, Barcelona was bombarded from the castle to put down a revolutionary rising, and the following year, during the Jamància revolt, General Prim ordered a second bombardment against the shipyards and the city walls.

From the closing years of the 19th century the castle held prisoners of political and social repression. Workers caught up in the anarchist violence of the 1890s were imprisoned and tortured there, in the proceedings known as the procés de Montjuïc. Detainees from the Setmana Tràgica followed, and on 13 October 1909 the pedagogue Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia, regarded as the founder of the Escola Moderna, was shot at the castle, held responsible for the events of that week. In 1919 it held more than 3,000 workers imprisoned during the La Canadenca dispute. In 1936 it filled with victims of revolutionary repression and, after the Civil War, with prisoners of the Franco state; among them Lluís Companys, President of the Generalitat of Catalonia, who was held there, tried by summary court and, on the orders of the Spanish State, shot on 15 October 1940.

The castle remained a military prison until 1960, when it was ceded to the city, and after three years of conversion work Francisco Franco presided over the opening of the army museum on 24 June 1963. It passed to Barcelona City Council between 2007 and 2008, and the museum closed on 24 May 2009. On 15 October 2011 the flag that President Companys had raised on the Santa Amàlia bastion in 1936 was hoisted there again.