Castell-Palau dels Aguilar: A Renaissance Castle-Palace in Alaquàs
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Crown of Aragon, Spanish
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page10 sections
History
Castell-Palau dels Aguilar is a sixteenth-century Renaissance castle-palace in Alaquàs, Spain, built by the Aguilar family as a noble residence that combined domestic life with defensive functions. Its restrained exterior emphasized the strength of a fortified residence, while its courtyard, apartments, decorated ceilings, and ceremonial rooms expressed the status of its owners. The building also reflects Alaquàs’s participation in the Valencian silk economy, since the castle-palace served as a center for silk production.
From conquest to the Aguilar lordship
After James I of Aragon conquered the Kingdom of Valencia in 1238, he granted Alaquàs and its associated rights to Bernat de Castelló, a knight from Catalonia, as a reward for military service. The Vilaragut family held the lordship from 1373 for almost a century and occupied an earlier fourteenth-century building on the site. The lordship later passed through several owners.
Jaime García de Aguilar took possession of Alaquàs in 1501. He belonged to a family of jurists that had held important offices during the reign of John II of Aragon, the fifteenth-century king of Aragon. During the sixteenth century, rising family income allowed the Aguilars to construct the present castle-palace. Its general external and internal arrangement remained in the surviving building.
The Pardo de la Casta and Manfredi families
After Jaime García’s death, Alaquàs passed to his male heirs and then to his grandson Luis Pardo de la Casta, who became the sole male heir. During the early seventeenth century, the Pardo de la Casta family entered military service to the Spanish monarchy in territories including the Duchy of Milan as its socioeconomic position declined.
Félix Pardo de la Casta, heir to the Alaquàs properties, served as governor and castellan of Cremona from 1675 to 1688. A castellan was responsible for the administration and defense of a castle or fortified town. Félix settled in Cremona, where his marriage and political position established the Italian branch of the Pardo de la Casta family and made him an important patron of the arts. He did not return to Alaquàs.
After Félix’s death in 1688, inheritance and marriage transferred rights to the lordship to the Italian Manfredi branch. Its representatives administered Alaquàs through empowered agents until jurisdictional lordships, feudal territories governed by noble families, disappeared in Spain during the nineteenth century. The last noble owner, the Marquis of La Casta and Manfredi and Baron of Bolbaite, sold the estate in the nineteenth century. Subsequent private owners changed the uses of the castle and its lands, harming the building’s preservation.
Protection and public recovery
In the early twentieth century, Julio Giménez Llorca sold the castle to the entrepreneur Vicente Gil Roca, who intended to demolish it. In 1918, the Centre de Cultura Valenciana, a Valencian cultural and scholarly institution, organized a campaign to document the building through drawings, photographs, plans, historical information, and other records. This work contributed to the 1921 publication of El Palau Senyorial d’Alaquàs by José Manuel Cortina Pérez and Vicente Ferrán Salvador, the first detailed study of the building.
The castle was declared a historic-artistic monument on 21 April 1918. Following protests and efforts that included the sculptor Mariano Benlliure, Alfonso XIII signed a royal order on 26 April 1921 declaring it a National Historic-Artistic Monument and halting the planned demolition. Protection did not prevent the northwestern tower from being demolished in 1928 after it threatened to collapse onto nearby houses.
After Vicente Gil Roca’s death, ownership was divided among his family members and was progressively acquired by the Lassala family. Isabel González de Lassala rented the building in 1922, and the Lassala family acquired it definitively in 1940. The castle became an Asset of Cultural Interest on 1 December 1999, a Spanish legal heritage designation protecting monuments and other historically significant cultural property.
The first democratic municipal administration, established in April 1979 under Mayor Albert Taberner, began a long effort to recover the castle as a public space. Alaquàs Town Council started procedures for public use in 1999. The municipal assembly approved expropriation on 13 June 2002, and the Valencian government authorized urgent occupation on 19 November 2002. With the support of public administrations, the municipality took possession of the monument on 3 January 2003, ending centuries of private ownership.
The castle opened to all citizens as a public cultural venue on 28 February 2003. A rehabilitation and restoration program begun in 2005 and completed on 19 March 2007 consolidated the structure, recovered interior spaces, restored or reconstructed historic elements, and adapted the building for cultural and educational use. In 2018, Gothic tiles from the castle that had been at risk of online sale were recovered and restored.
Remains
Plan, materials, and defensive form
The castle occupies a square plot measuring 38.90 meters on each side, with an area of approximately 1,513 square meters. Its Renaissance character appears in the ordered plan and the large central courtyard with a cloister-like portico. Dressed stone and brick form the principal materials, while the restrained outer elevations retain the appearance of a fortified noble residence.
The main entrance, plinth, and four corners use ashlar, regularly cut masonry blocks intended for substantial structural or architectural elements. These stones differ markedly in condition and appearance from the rest of the building, suggesting that material from an earlier structure on the same site was reused. The castle rises partly below the level of the surrounding streets and originally had four levels: a lower floor or semi-basement, a mezzanine, a principal floor, and a fourth floor. Four battlemented towers rise above the upper level. One was reconstructed in recent times, and the towers reach approximately 25 meters in height. Cross-topped weather vanes remain visible above the battlements.
Lower levels and courtyard
The lower floor functioned as a semi-basement containing stables, oil mills, cellars, and decorated wooden ceilings known as alfarjes. It includes an access stair made entirely from ashlar blocks, together with coffered ceilings in the vestibule and portico. A coffered ceiling is divided into recessed decorative panels, often made of wood. The former stables now contain the library, whose holdings address local history, the Valencian Renaissance, the castle, and studies prepared for its master plan.
The mezzanine has finely carved internal doors, coffered ceilings with varied finishes, and a characteristic arrangement of large windows. The principal floor is reached by the unfinished main staircase and contains the most important noble apartments. Its courtyard gallery incorporates pointed arches and colonnades. The principal staircase was restored to its former position against the courtyard according to Renaissance principles of proportion, symmetry, and harmony. A mid-twentieth-century staircase at the main entrance was removed because it obstructed direct movement from the courtyard and reduced the usefulness of adjoining rooms.
Principal apartments and ceremonial rooms
The principal floor gives access to an iron-grille tribune set within the thickness of the castle wall above the Church of the Assumption. This arrangement reflects the patronage exercised by the lords of Alaquàs over the church. On the west façade, a large room may have served as the principal dining room and kitchen. It contains a monumental fireplace. The east façade leads to the principal hall, the largest room in the building, whose ceiling is 7.33 meters high and covered by an elaborate coffered ceiling. Other richly decorated ceilings survive in rooms on the same floor.
The fourth floor was originally used for granaries and servants’ quarters and has since been dismantled. The upper terrace was recovered as a usable space during the restoration. The courtyard openings were returned to their original configuration, while Neo-Gothic window surrounds added by earlier owners were removed to avoid producing a false historical appearance.
Tiles, graffiti, and restoration
Surviving floor tiles include Gothic, Mudéjar, and Renaissance forms. Mudéjar refers to Christian buildings and decoration in medieval and early-modern Iberia that used forms, techniques, or artisans associated with Islamic artistic traditions. The different tile traditions reflect both an earlier building on the site and the lengthy period required to construct the present castle. Jaume Coll, director of the González Martí National Museum of Ceramics and Decorative Arts, catalogued 275 tile types. The most important examples remain in situ in rooms throughout the building.
During the 2005 to 2007 restoration, later plastic paint was removed from the coffered ceilings, the upper floor was reinforced with iron beams, deteriorated sections were restored to their sixteenth-century appearance, and protective treatments were applied. Surviving ceramic flooring was consolidated. The gallery floor was replaced with a new surface respecting the colors and Renaissance character of the original sixteenth-century tiles, while a small number of surviving gallery examples were displayed in the towers.
The restoration also exposed and catalogued seventeenth- and eighteenth-century graffiti, including drawings of ships. Some of these marks may have been made by painters associated with ship crews. Remains of locks and other iron fittings are scarce, while the tower weather vanes continue to provide visible evidence of the building’s upper defensive silhouette.
Adaptation as a cultural center
Several rooms now serve exhibition, educational, and public purposes. Sala La Nova occupies the principal floor and is intended for major art collections. Sala La Torre, on the mezzanine, accommodates exhibitions, and Sala Vilaragut occupies the semi-basement on three levels. Its lowest level includes an accessible aljibe, a cistern or underground water-storage tank. Sala de la Xemeneia is a large multipurpose room for conferences, audiovisual screenings, and public events.
Sala 28 de Febrero commemorates the castle’s opening to the public and hosts exhibitions and cultural activities. Sala Cremona, named in connection with the twinning of Alaquàs and Cremona, is a spacious open-plan room for different events. The restored castle now also contains the Enric Valor Adult Education Center, the Valencian headquarters of the Ernest Lluch Foundation, and a library oriented toward research, heritage education, and the dissemination of local history.
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