THE CASTLE OF MONTEAGUDO

The Castle of Monteagudo is situated on the top of a hill formed by calcareous rock, from which you can see the whole of the northern valley of the "Huerta". On its hillsides sits the town of Monteagudo, some five kilometres from the city of Murcia and ten kilometres from Orihuela. It constitutes one of the most impressive and well-preserved fortifications in the region of Murcia. In recent years, the Autonomous Community has been carrying out excavation, restoration and fitting out of the entrances in order to make it easier to appreciate its sociocultural and tourist value.

It was situated in this place for strategic reasons, namely it is a military building. As its name suggests (Monte-agut), the fortification occupies a very abrupt massif with a height of 149m and it spreads over two platforms with a diameter of 400m. At its feet runs the "camino viejo de Monteagudo" (the old Monteagudo road) joining two important routes running from the city: the Alicante and Castille roads.

For this reason, the peopling of this town seems to have been a prolonged and uninterrupted process. Recent archaeological excavations carried out in the foothills have discovered funeral urns from the Argaric Bronze age and pieces of pottery and architecture from the Iberian and Roman civilisations.

The architectural remains which we have are the fruit of numerous restorations and occupations going back to the Islamic period. Before the founding of Murcia, it would have been a rural castle where local peasants took refuge. When the city became the true capital of the territory, "Hisn Montagut" became an urban castle, a true fort and defensive watchtower of the Murcian emirs who resided in the city and in the Royal Almunia, of which the castle forms a part. In times of instability, the permanent garrison of the castle was ready to alert the defenders of Murcia to the arrival of the enemy, by way of smoke signals by day or fire by night. As a state fortification, it would have had other uses, for example, as a prison (1078-09), where the Murcian king Ibn Tahir himself was imprisoned in its dungeons. It could also have been a storage place for the cereal paid by the peasants as a tribute and it had large wells to supply the garrison, etc. For the maintenance of the building we know by way of Ibn Al-Jatib that at least in the time of Emir Ibn Mardanish, the prisoners were forced to carry out hard labour (alsofra) for some days in order to shorten their sentence.

Regarding building techniques, the Moorish architects (Alarifes) built their solid walls with mortar and marked them with rectangular towers, close together and rising a small distance above the top of the wall, acting as supports. The base of the wall is modelled to the layout of the land, spreading through two terraces, situated at different heights. The lower building can be accessed by the southern flank through a dirt track and some difficult steps. Along this building which spreads throughout the north-eastern flank, you can appreciate the large wells, granaries, and other areas. It is possible to access this part by way of some steps and an interesting stone elbow door carved with a pick and chisel. The building constitutes a strongly defended citadel with a rectangular plan of 50 x 25 meters.

After the Christian Conquest, the castle did not lose its strategic character, remaining under the control of the Castilian monarchy. We know that it was visited on at least two occasions by Alfonso X el Sabio himself and that different royal "alcaides" or castle guards resided there. Once the kingdom of Murcia, dependent of Castille, had been shaped, it became a real border castle between two rival Christian kingdoms: Aragon and Castille. This situation lasted until the end of the XV century, when the Catholic Kings united the kingdoms and conquered the Muslim kingdom of Granada (1492).

We could not forget to mention that, on the summit of the hill, dominating the valley, stands the monument of Reparation to the Heart of Jesus, a majestic sculpture which is fourteen metres high and was designed in 1951 by the artist Nicolás Martínez. In reality, this monumental work worshipped by those living nearby is a replica of a previous sculpture, built in 1926 and destroyed during the second Republic.