Underinvestment, crumbling walls and rave parties: Spain doesn’t know what to do with its castles
16 May 2026 at 04:00
“A nursery of ruins functioning as a quarry.” Architect Ignacio Gil Crespo adopts the analysis that art critic Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño used in the early 1950s to assess the state of Spanish castles. “When you visit a town where the castle is somewhat ruined, it’s very easy to see fragments of it in the houses,” explains the specialist, a member of the National Defensive Architecture Plan commission. Although the general state of fortresses remains, in general, dilapidated, some things have changed in the last century. “We have 800 or 1,000 years of neglect and 100 years of awareness and restoration,” he clarifies.

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