Castle of La Mota: A Late Medieval Fortress in Spain
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- Spain
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- Medieval
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- Medieval, Modern
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- Crown of Castile, Spanish
- Site type
- Military
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- Castle
On this page13 sections
History
Castle of La Mota is a medieval Castilian fortress in Spain, at Medina del Campo in Valladolid, that developed from the fortified enclosure of the town’s old settlement and was transformed into a major gunpowder-era stronghold between 1476 and 1483. Its history reflects the political struggles of late medieval Castile, the consolidation of royal authority, and the adaptation of fortifications to cannon warfare.
Origins and dynastic conflict
Medina del Campo was probably repopulated between 1070 and 1080. The old-town enclosure was fortified after the settlement’s revival, and the growth of Medina eventually turned La Mota into a separate fortress. A larger wall was later built around the expanding town, although only fragments of that enclosure survive.
La Mota became involved in the conflicts that divided Castile during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In 1354, Henry of Trastámara, the Castilian prince who later became King Henry II and founded the Trastámara dynasty, and his supporters seized Medina by force. Troops loyal to King Peter of Castile withdrew into the old town. In 1390, King John I of Castile granted Medina and La Mota to his son Ferdinand of Antequera, who later became king of Aragon. After Ferdinand’s death in 1416, the possession passed to his son, John of Aragon.
In 1433, local inhabitants were ordered to contribute 2,000 maravedis toward work on the fortress. The maravedí was a medieval Iberian currency. Rivalry between John II of Castile and the Aragonese Infantes, the sons of Ferdinand of Antequera, repeatedly divided control of Medina. In 1439, the Aragonese closed the town gates and held the Castilian king inside the town. In 1441, John II besieged La Mota, where about 250 Aragonese supporters had taken shelter with little food or water.
Royal control and the keep
After the Battle of Olmedo in 1445, La Mota came permanently under royal control. Around 1460, Henry IV of Castile ordered the construction of a major tower, now identified with the keep. In 1464, he entrusted custody of the castle to Alonso Carrillo, Archbishop of Toledo. Carrillo later supported the rebellious Prince Alfonso, and royal forces captured the fortress under the command of Pedrarias Dávila.
Prince Alfonso’s supporters recovered La Mota in 1467. After Alfonso died in 1468, his sister Isabella continued the rebellion and received Medina, its alcázar, fortresses, and La Mota through the Treaty of the Bulls of Guisando. An alcázar was a fortified royal or aristocratic residence. Henry IV nevertheless transferred Medina to his daughter Joanna in 1470, while Alonso Fonseca, Archbishop of Seville, retained La Mota until his death in 1473.
That year, Medina’s inhabitants, assisted by the local commander of Castronuño, besieged the fortress and intended to demolish it. The archbishop’s nephew defended La Mota, but eventually negotiated its surrender to the Duke of Alba. The duke held the castle until 1475 and made minor internal repairs. In that year, the Crown reclaimed La Mota and ordered its delivery to Alfonso de Quintanilla, the royal representative.
The artillery barrier
The Catholic Monarchs, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, then commissioned a new artillery barrier during their wars with Portugal. Their joint rule brought the Castilian and Aragonese crowns into dynastic union. The works lasted approximately seven years, from 1476 to 1483. Master Fernando, an artilleryman in the royal armies, and Master Abdalla, a Mudéjar builder, were the principal recorded craftsmen. Mudéjar architecture used Islamic building traditions and decorative forms in Christian-ruled Iberian territories. Master Ali of Lerma is also recorded as an engineer. The completed barrier bears the date 1483 on the stone shield above its main entrance.
The new defences surrounded the earlier castle with massive walls and a deep ditch. Their design responded to the increasing use of gunpowder artillery. Low, thick walls, firing chambers, flanking towers, sloping revetments, ventilation systems, and underground galleries allowed the fortress to meet attacks at several levels. This transformed La Mota from a traditional high-walled castle into a complex artillery stronghold.
Prison and royal stronghold
La Mota also served as a state prison. Its prisoners included Hernando Pizarro, Rodrigo Calderón, Fernando, Duke of Calabria, César Borgia, and the Count of Aranda. Rodrigo Calderón was a prominent court official, while Hernando Pizarro was a Spanish conquistador. César Borgia, an Italian-Spanish Renaissance military leader and papal prince, was the son of Pope Alexander VI and was also known as the Duke Valentino.
César Borgia escaped during the night of 25 October 1506 by descending from the keep on ropes. Because the rope did not reach the ground, he had to jump the final distance. He then fled with the Count of Benavente through Villalón and Santander before eventually reaching Navarre.
During the Revolt of the Comuneros in 1520 and 1521, a rising against royal authority in Castile, the fortress remained loyal to the Crown even though Medina supported the Comunero movement and possessed a major artillery park. Local representatives proposed using the artillery against La Mota, but the garrison and the diplomatic conduct of its commander prevented an assault.
Damage, restoration, and later use
Maintenance problems continued for centuries. Repairs to the two drawbridges were recorded in 1550. In 1649, the fixed outer bridge of the detached artillery work and parts of the artillery barrier were rebuilt. An inspection in 1774 reported serious erosion of the ditch’s outer slope, known as the counterscarp. Between 1806 and 1848, one barrier tower had disappeared, apparently after being blown up. During the Peninsular War, part of the detached artillery work was destroyed, and an attempt to blow up the southern wall failed.
Restoration resumed in the early twentieth century. From 1913 to 1916, Teodosio Torres reconstructed battlements and parapets, completed the tops of the walls, and renewed paving on the wall walks and towers. Juan Agapito y Revilla directed further repairs in stages from 1917 to 1919 and from 1928 to 1929. These interventions consolidated weakened elements and improved access to the barrier, underground galleries, and keep.
After the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco assigned the castle to the Women’s Section of FET de las JONS, the official Falangist political organization under his regime. Its Women’s Section was the regime’s female branch and organized political and educational activities for women. Between 1939 and 1942, restoration adapted La Mota for the Major School of Leadership of the Women’s Section. The school closed by royal decree in January 1977. The work largely respected the original domestic distribution, although it added modern structures beside the keep and gave parts of the complex a historicist appearance inspired especially by the Hospital of La Latina and the period of the Catholic Monarchs.
In 1992, a documentation and diagnostic programme directed by Fernando Cobos Guerra, with assistance from architect Ignacio García de Tuñón and documentalist Antonio Andrade, produced complete plans, analysed building fabrics from different periods, and examined archival material. Combined with systematic excavations, this work revealed previously concealed aspects of the complex and contributed to recognition of La Mota as a major work of Renaissance European military architecture. The castle had already been declared a National Monument and a Spanish cultural property of Monument status on 8 November 1904. It is owned by the Junta of Castile and León and is used for conferences, courses, seminars, and cultural activities.
Remains
Castle of La Mota occupies part of a corner of the former old-town enclosure on a raised mound. Its irregular trapezoidal plan reflects the incorporation of earlier fortifications and broadly corresponds to the castles of the Valladolid school, a group of late medieval Castilian castles associated with substantial brick construction, powerful towers, and layouts adapted to the military architecture of Valladolid and its surrounding region. The complex is arranged around two principal enclosures: a low outer barbican and a much stronger inner enclosure.
Earlier enclosure and outer defences
The outer enclosure has round towers at its corners and at the centres of its sides. Its outer face slopes toward the ditch, and its gate is protected by two substantial towers connected vertically. The inner enclosure rises behind it with high walls and strong corner towers, while the keep occupies its northern angle. The castle is built mainly from the reddish brick characteristic of the region. Stone appears selectively in loopholes, heraldic shields, and other small details.
The older enclosure was constructed in lime-and-rubble concrete. Its primitive towers were faced in concrete and separated by horizontal courses of brick. A preserved Mudéjar gate from this earlier wall is enclosed within the later castle. Its form and the treatment of the primitive towers suggest a date in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. The later defences incorporated the gate towers while allowing the original gate to continue functioning as an external passage.
A surviving rectangular tower of the old wall is probably the main remnant of the works associated with John of Aragon around 1433. Its rear arch was blocked when the later castle wall was built. The keep attributed to Henry IV was probably complete by 1468, forming the principal northern strongpoint of the inner enclosure.
The keep
The keep, or Tower of Homage, is a fifteenth-century square tower about 38 metres high, with exterior sides measuring approximately 13 metres. It forms the northern corner of the inner enclosure and defended the entrance leading to the parade ground. The tower currently has five storeys. Its first and second floors contain reconstructed octagonal rooms with flat vaults, while the third floor is square and has a vault built with full centering, a temporary supporting framework used during construction.
The upper rooms use complex transitions between square and polygonal plans. One room changes from a square to an octagon through corner half-vaults, or squinches, and then becomes a sixteen-sided polygon carried on a projecting triangular arcade. The highest room is square, covered by a cloister vault, and changes to an octagonal form through flat pendentives, which are supporting surfaces that allow a vault to rest over a different-shaped room.
The keep’s platform has machicolations along all four façades. These projecting openings allowed defenders to fire or drop objects onto attackers below. Eight bartizans, small projecting defensive turrets, protect the platform and form re-entrant angles. A central turret known as the Caballero rises above the platform and has semicircular arches. The stairways now embedded in the keep’s walls are modern constructions from the restorations of 1913 and 1940 rather than original access routes.
Artillery barrier and underground works
The artillery barrier surrounds the earlier castle with massive walls and a deep ditch. It contains four firing levels, more than 200 artillery openings, ventilation systems, and over half a kilometre of internal galleries. Vaulted firing chambers and lower galleries were arranged for level fire across the surrounding ground. The corner and gate towers supported flanking fire, while their low height and vulnerability to infantry assault were balanced by the ditch, broad sloping revetments, and firing galleries at lower levels. Together, these works created three or four levels from which the approaches could be defended.
Ventilation shafts and chimneys carried cannon smoke away from the vaulted chambers. Some firing rooms have spherical-cap vaults designed to resist mortar impacts. A listening shaft in the lower projecting parts of the fortification, called the Airón Well, was intended to detect mining and allow the construction of countermining galleries. Its name is associated with the god Airón.
The strongest barrier tower projects markedly outward, probably to improve protection of the flanks at the most exposed point. It contains three spherical vaults and ventilation openings. A well in its outer part probably supplied water for cooling cannon and probably also served a countermining purpose. A second well in the covered way was connected to the older well by an underground gallery.
The barrier’s original layout was designed around a pre-existing well. The new wall passed over it and included a chimney-like opening so that the water could remain in use. A defensive courtyard surrounded the keep, and a drawbridge formerly connected that courtyard with an elevated entrance in the tower.
Entrance and detached artillery work
The entrance structure includes a defensive courtyard, a large lower vaulted chamber at the centre of the subterranean defences, and a dungeon beneath it. A restored stairway descends from the courtyard to the underground chamber. A route around the dungeon reaches a postern, a smaller secondary gate, which provided access to the ditch.
The entrance drawbridge pivoted on a reconstructed diaphragm arch and rested against a detached artillery work positioned in the middle of the ditch. This work formed an intermediate crossing between two deflected bridges and has been partly recovered through recent restoration. Its arrangement prevented artillery from firing directly through both the outer and inner gates.
Courtyard, chapel, and domestic interiors
The current parade ground is a twentieth-century reconstruction arranged in three wings. Pointed arches open the wings onto the courtyard, reproducing the general lines of the original domestic buildings. Its Gothic portal is a cast copy of the portal commissioned by Beatriz Galindo, known as La Latina, for the Hospital of La Latina in Madrid. The original portal was made by the Arab builder Hazan, and its installation at La Mota was arranged by the Marquis of Lozoya.
The portal combines a Muslim-influenced entrance arch, ball ornament, figures beneath canopies, and a naturalistic alfiz, the rectangular frame around an arch used especially in Islamic and Mudéjar architecture. It also carries representations of the embrace of Saints Joachim and Anne before the Golden Gate, the arms of the Ramírez and Galindo families, and two saints.
The twentieth-century chapel is dedicated to Saint Mary of the Castle and follows a Romanesque-Mudéjar design proposed by Justo Pérez de Urbel. Its main altar has a retable with reliefs of six Spanish saints: Raymond of Fitero, the Apostle James, Ferdinand III, Teresa of Jesus, Isidore of Madrid, and Isidore of Seville. The retable is topped by a sixteenth-century ivory Christ on an iron cross and accompanied by a silver basilica-shaped tabernacle.
Wooden images of Saint Mary of the Castle and Saint Joseph, made by the sculptor José Clara, stand among the chapel’s furnishings. Known collectively as the “Mota group,” they were carved from a cherry trunk whose colour harmonizes with the brickwork. The chapel also contains a Flemish triptych attributed to Hans Memling or Jan van Eyck, a seventeenth-century Saint Teresa associated with the workshop of Gregorio Fernández, and a fifteenth-century Catalan panel influenced by Italian art.
A stone slab from the first tomb of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, dating from the period when his remains lay at El Escorial, forms part of the chapel floor. The vestibule contains a painted canvas copy of Juan de la Cosa’s chart, reproduced from the version in Madrid’s Naval Museum, together with a Haitian wooden sculpture representing an Indigenous figure with a drum and two lateral figures.
Noble floor and Queen’s room
A flamboyant Flemish Neo-Gothic Honour Staircase leads to the noble floor. Like the courtyard portal, it is copied from the Hospital of La Latina. The staircase reaches the Hall of Honour, which opens onto one of the rectangular towers.
The seven-metre-long and two-metre-wide room known as the Queen’s Dressing Room or Lookout is traditionally associated with Joanna of Castile, who was said to have waited there for her husband. The room has a continuous pointed barrel vault decorated with Gothic tracery and rose windows, with remnants of its original polychromy. The emblems of the Catholic Monarchs once appeared in the vault’s tympana and are now barely visible. Plasterwork bearing the same symbols decorates the Hall of Honour.
