Tower of Paterna: A Medieval Defensive Fortification in Spain
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Almoravid, Crown of Aragon
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Tower
On this page7 sections
History
The Tower of Paterna is a defensive fortification in Paterna, Spain, built in the late eleventh or early twelfth century as part of the defensive belt surrounding Valencia. The network also included towers at Museros, Moncada, Quart, Torrent, and Silla. The tower originally had a square plan, but after the Christian conquest, the medieval expansion of Christian-ruled kingdoms into territories formerly governed by Muslim polities in Iberia, it was probably reshaped into its distinctive truncated-conical form during the fourteenth century.
The defensive tower
The tower protected the town and formed part of a wider system of fortifications. Its position on a hill or promontory near Paterna’s former castle gave it a defensive role within the settlement. The original arrangement placed the entrance on the second floor, reached by a movable staircase. A 1971 architectural intervention designed by Vicente García changed the building’s appearance by adding an exterior spiral staircase and restoring the machicolations at the cornice. Machicolations are projecting defensive structures from which defenders could observe or attack people immediately below.
The growth of the cave settlement
The excavated dwellings around the tower, known as the Coves de la Torre, developed mainly from the second half of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth century. They supplied homes for day laborers and workers during a period of strong demographic pressure, using communal land such as Bovalar, an area of land associated with Paterna. Some caves may date to the period of the Muslim invasion, the early medieval conquest of parts of Iberia by Muslim forces.
The settlement expanded especially rapidly during the nineteenth century and reached its greatest extent in the first half of the twentieth century. It contained 38 caves in 1824 and 495 in 1940, when its population made up 23.39 percent of Paterna’s total population. The cave settlement, including dwellings along the former Batán road, became very densely populated. Later urban changes, particularly the construction of housing estates after the 1957 flood, encouraged abandonment of the caves as homes. Attempts to retain some craft activity did not prevent the decline of their use, and many caves were later demolished.
Protection and later use
The tower and surrounding caves received designation as an Asset of Cultural Interest on 16 July 1971. This Spanish heritage-protection category applies to places valued for their historical, architectural, archaeological, or cultural qualities. During the 1980s, the tower housed the Paterna Museum of Ceramics. The museum later moved to Paterna’s former town hall.
Remains
The tower
The Tower of Paterna stands amid the Coves de la Torre, which lie chiefly to its north and east. The surrounding terrain is flat and densely built up. The tower rises 19.5 metres and narrows from a lower diameter of 12.70 metres to an upper diameter of 9.60 metres. It has three stories and a terrace: the first two levels are square, the third is octagonal, and the terrace is circular.
The ground floor was probably a cistern, a structure for collecting and storing water, supplied from the terrace. Two low barrel vaults divide the space into two parts, with a central pilaster and two low arches springing from it. The second floor, approximately 5 metres square, contains the current entrance. Its roof is an octagonal vault joined to the square room by corner squinches, structural devices that bridge the transition between a square space and a polygonal vault. The vault is lined with brick, while the surrounding mortar wall is approximately 3 to 3.5 metres thick.
A western doorway leads to the third floor, with the staircase set within the thickness of the wall. This octagonal level repeats elements of the floor below. From it, another staircase rises to the terrace, whose covering includes three small brick groin vaults. Groin vaults are formed by the intersection of two vaults. The circular terrace has eight projecting parapets with loopholes, narrow openings in a defensive wall, arranged to create eight crenellations, the raised sections of a battlement. The restored machicolations remain part of the tower’s defensive form.
The Coves de la Torre
The caves are dwellings excavated into the ground around the tower. Their forms include horizontal excavation, vertical excavation, and a mixed arrangement, the predominant type at Paterna. In this form, a courtyard was first dug vertically until it reached a new horizontal level. Rooms were then excavated horizontally around the opening.
Many dwellings follow the cova enclotada model, a type of excavated home arranged around a shared sunken courtyard or communal open space. These dwellings have ramped entrances and no facade facing the street. The ground consists of several layers that made excavation possible: a thin covering of topsoil, a compact impermeable limestone layer 20 to 30 centimetres thick that formed the roof, a porous limestone layer 40 to 50 centimetres thick that could be worked with picks, and an easily excavated clay layer. The resulting dwellings provided relatively pleasant temperatures in both summer and winter.
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