Location: Aldea de Rey, Ciudad Real province
Constructed: 1217
Tel. 926 69 31 19
Open: Tue- Sun
The Sacred Castle-Convent of Calatrava la Nueva is located on the Alacranejo hill, within the municipality of Aldea del Rey, in the province of Ciudad Real (Spain) in front of the Castillo de Salvatierra.
In what is now the parking lot (end of the access
road), remains from the Bronze Age and a Visigothic settlement have
been found. The fortress is located at the top of the cone-shaped
Cerro Alacranejo, 936 m above sea level. The hill has dense native
vegetation on its slopes and at its base and is surrounded by large
rocks or screes that make access difficult. The cobbled path that
exists today was made for Philip II's visit to the fortress in 1560
and leads to the base of the castle. Its location controls one of
the natural passes to Sierra Morena. The exact year of its
construction is not known, although there are references to its use
by Nuño de Lara in 1187 as the old castle of Dueñas.
In 1191
Rodrigo Gutiérrez Girón and his second wife, Jimena, donated for
their souls to the Order of Calatrava half of the income and
inheritances they had in this ancient Dueñas Castle, expressly
leaving half of the income in favor of the children of the first
marriage of the donor. Three years later, they sold their rights in
the castle to the Order for the sum of 1000 maravedis.
In
1201, Alfonso VIII confirmed full ownership of the castle to the
Calatravos. In 1211 the Muslims recovered the nearby castle of
Salvatierra, which would not return to Christian rule until 1226;
This reinforced the strategic importance of the hill where the
Dueñas castle was located.
The current fortress is large
(46,000 square meters), and was built by the Calatravian knights in
the years 1213 to 1217, after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa,
using a large part of prisoners taken in the war as labor. said
battle. Once erected, it became the headquarters of the Order of
Calatrava, and one of the most important fortresses in Castile. Its
history runs parallel to that of the Order itself.
It was
built to replace the city of Calatrava la Vieja as its headquarters,
located further north, on the left bank of the Guadiana River, the
place where this military order had been founded in the middle of
the century.
The castle survived until the 19th century, when
it was abandoned after the religious confiscations undertaken by
Minister Mendizábal to clean up state accounts in 1835.
The
convent of Calatrava la Nueva was declared a historical-artistic
monument belonging to the National Artistic Treasure on June 3,
1931, during the Second Republic, by means of a decree published on
the 4th of that same month in the Madrid Gazette, with the signature
of the president of the provisional Government of the Republic
Niceto Alcalá-Zamora and the minister of Public Education and Fine
Arts Marcelino Domingo y Sanjuán.
In 1997 the place served as
the setting for the investiture as an honorary doctor of Umberto Eco
by the University of Castilla-La Mancha, making it inevitable to
remember the setting of his novel The Name of the Rose. In September
2010 it was one of the settings filming of the movie Captain Thunder
and the Holy Grail.
Documents are preserved detailing the entire building and the
distribution of the rooms. In reality, it is a complex complex made
up of a church, convent, inn, village and external enclosure, all
heavily fortified. From the plain you ascend to the fortress
skirting its outer walls and reach an esplanade where the 15th
century outer door opens, allowing you to enter the external
enclosure or list which is limited by two almost parallel walls.
This enclosure was used to keep livestock, to house troops in
transit and to shelter peasants in case of danger.
From the
list you access the convent area through a huge chamber located next
to the wall, semi-subterranean. The guardhouse and stables were
located in this chamber. The inn was built on top of it, the upper
floors of which are missing. When leaving the stables you enter an
intermediate defensive space, which was a passageway. To the right
is the convent of which only the floors and part of the walls
remain.
The path continues towards the castle whose high
walls rise before the viewer. To the left you can see various
semi-underground rooms that can be visited. These are old warehouses
on which the guard's house stands today, which in turn occupies part
of the old inn. Continuing along the path, to the right you can see
enormous peak-cut rocks that form the base of the castle walls and
to the left an esplanade now equipped with tables for the use of
visitors. From here you can see the town's enclosure, which
preserves the complete walls along whose walkway you can circulate.
In this town there were streets and houses and it was where the
servants of the castle and the convent lived. It is located on a
large rectangular projection of the wall and has its turrets and a
so-called secret gate.
It is Cistercian style. It has a large rose window on its façade,
from the time of the Catholic Monarchs. The buttresses are like towers.
Inside there are three large naves covered with brick vaults and three
apses with pointed arches. On the left side there were funerary chapels
that were later bricked up and destroyed and are yet to be restored. To
the left of the façade was the dovecote and the snow well. There was an
entry from the list. To the right is the Campo de los Mártires
(cemetery), with the chapel of Our Lady of the Martyrs, enormous
underground cisterns and the path up to the castle.
In the
church, Alfonso de Molina was buried in a sumptuous tomb that was
sheltered by an arch in the Main Chapel of the temple.
The
cloister of the convent is accessed through a door in the right side
nave. Traces of the arch supports remain. Behind this cloister there is
a passage between its walls and the foundations of the castle through
which you reach the first door of the castle itself.
It is located in the center and at the top of the entire fortress.
Its first door, with a pointed arch, functioned as a barbican that
protected the second door, which is reached after a curved and
open-ceiling route. The second door opens in the castle walls and gives
access to a large stable with a pointed barrel vault, separated from the
parade ground by pillars.
Once located in the parade ground, to
the right there is a modern stone spiral staircase that accesses the old
archive of the Order of Calatrava. To the left is the entrance to the
Master's chamber, with the Calatrava Cross over the pointed arch. Below
there is a cistern. In front, there is the main access to the castle
premises; It is a large staircase that leads to various chambers.
This staircase leads to four levels:
First level: To the right
you enter a vaulted chamber that communicated with the floor above
through a trapdoor in the ceiling. At the back, through a narrow
entrance, you access a cistern. You have to return to the ladder to
continue the ascent.
Second level: There is a long, narrow chamber
that was divided into two floors by a wooden floor. The second floor
with a wooden floor was accessed from the platform where the stairs will
end if we continue along it.
Third level: This platform was the main
floor. It only preserves its walls and windows. It is 20 m from the
outside ground. From there you can reach the archive (vaulted chamber
with a window that looks at the Salvatierra castle which is a short
distance away). On the opposite side you reach the last level.
Last
level: From here you can see the entire area. The view from the area of
the masts is impressive: to the south you can see the Sierra Morena, to
the east, the Salvatierra castle.