Santa Bárbara Castle

Santa Bárbara Castle crowns Mount Benacantil, the rock bordering the sea in the centre of Alicante. From the summit the whole bay and its landward approaches can be watched, which gave the fortress its enormous strategic value; seen from the beach, the mountain resembles a face — "the face of the Moor" — an icon of the city. Bronze Age, Iberian and Roman remains have been found on its slopes, but the fortress itself dates from the late 9th century, under Muslim rule. The medieval Arab geographer Al-Idrisi called the mountain Banu-lQatil, and some historians trace the name to bena, an Arabic rendering of the Latin pinna, a crag, and laqanti, from Laqant, the Arabs' name for Alicante.

On 4 December 1248 the castle was taken from the Arabs by the infante Alfonso of Castile, the future Alfonso X the Wise; it took its name from Saint Barbara, on whose feast day it fell. In 1296, after hard resistance by its castellan Nicolás Peris, James II seized the whole enclosure for the Crown of Aragon and ordered its remodelling. Almost a century later Peter IV the Ceremonious had the circuit corrected, and early in the 16th century Charles I ordered it fortified.

The great transformation came under Philip II. Juan Coloma y Cardona, appointed keeper of the castle, drove the construction of most of the buildings that survive today, built between 1562 and 1580 to designs by the engineers Juan Bautista Antonelli and Giacomo Palearo, "el Fratín". The middle enclosure holds the rooms finished in 1580 — the Philip II Hall, the troop quarters facing the broad Patio de Armas, the Queen's Bastion — while the oldest footings on the summit, at "La Torreta" around the old keep, go back to the 11th to 13th centuries.

A French squadron bombarded Alicante and its castle in 1691, and in the War of the Spanish Succession the fighting of 1706–1709 — three years in which the castle was held by the British — gravely damaged the whole enclosure. From the 18th century its military role declined, and it served at times as a prison.

On 28 January 1844, during Colonel Pantaleón Boné's rebellion, the castle was occupied by forces opposed to the government of General Espartero. Juan Martín Arranz, a soldier Boné trusted, betrayed him and handed the castle to Espartero's troops; the revolt was crushed, and Boné and his supporters were shot on the harbour mole, where the Monument to the Martyrs of Liberty was later raised. The castle's last military action came in 1873, when the ironclad frigate Numancia, in the hands of cantonalist rebels from Cartagena, shelled the town and the castle; the castle's guns were removed twenty years later.

During the Spanish Civil War the castle was used to hold prisoners — first men aligned with the Nationalist side, later prisoners loyal to the Second Republic, most of them brought from the port of Alicante and the Los Almendros concentration camp. From April 1939, after the war's end, it operated as a Francoist concentration camp for Republican prisoners until the end of that year. Marks and inscriptions cut by those prisoners can still be seen in parts of the castle.

The castle then lay abandoned until 1963, when it was opened to the public and two lifts were inaugurated, rising through the rock of the mountain from a tunnel off the Avenida de Jovellanos, opposite Postiguet beach. Declared a historic-artistic monument in 1961, it now houses the Museum of the City of Alicante (MUSA), whose five rooms are complemented by the Renaissance cistern.