The Castle That Never Was: El Puerto de Santa María
Imagine, if you will, the final years of the previous millennium. During the semester I was studying abroad in Córdoba, Spain, I tagged along with some friends on a trip to Cádiz.
Among other amazing activities in this ancient port city, we took a mini-steamboat to the town across the bay, El Puerto de Santa María.
They boasted of having a castle built for Alfonso X, the Castle of San Marcos, so of course we went to see it. That was probably due to my insistence — I’ve been a castle lover since forever — but I don’t recall due to the passage of time.
I’d just “discovered” King Alfonso X, el Sabio, in music appreciation class and was commencing an intellectual flirtation that would develop into a lifelong passion.
I was delighted he’d had such a pretty castle made. I don’t think there was a guided tour or much indication of what we were looking at, so the interpretation was all up to us.
Nearly a decade later, in the twenty-first century, I’d started reading for my doctoral dissertation. That was when I learned that no fewer than 24 miracles take place in El Puerto de Santa María in the collection of the Cantigas de Santa María, a stunning masterpiece of multimedia art created for and by Alfonso X that recounts nearly 400 miracles.
So, not only did Alfonso X put a pretty castle in this place, but he also mentioned it 24 times in his favorite book. (The second-most mentioned place is Santa María de Salas outside Huesca with 16.) I filed El Puerto de Santa María away as a place I needed to visit again under a more scholarly gaze.
In September of this year, I was finally able to make that second trip.
Although my train was late, and I arrived after nightfall out there on the edge of the world, I was too excited to stay in my hotel room and ventured out to the castle in the dark.
Even in the gloom, it seemed to be one of the prettiest castles I’ve ever seen, with its Almohad-inspired towers — one hexagonal — and the red Gothic lettering on them.
First thing in the morning, I hiked back to the castle plaza to reserve a spot on the midday tour. I was disappointed to find people setting up for a biker convention, which was going to give my photos in the plaza a distinctly modern look and make the guided visit harder to listen to with its piped music.
But the plaza was called Alfonso X el Sabio! What more could I ask for?
The reason there are 24 cantigas about El Puerto is that Alfonso X brought a wildly miraculous devotional statue of St. Mary and her Child with him when he took El Puerto for Castile in 1264.
The place used to be called Al-Qanatir or Alcanate, a name that perhaps refers to a Roman bridge across the river here. Cantiga 328 describes how the Christian settlers changed the name to El Puerto de Santa María in the statue’s honor.
Alfonso X had a chapel built for it in the very castle where I was standing. Five hundred years later, the people of El Puerto felt the castle wasn’t good enough anymore, and the figure was moved.
My spot on the tour reserved and my enthusiasm in crescendo, I headed over to the basilica to see the lady with 24 beautiful songs dedicated to her.
The image in question is tucked into its own chapel, built between 1612 and 1620 at the behest of Prince Manuel Filiberto de Saboya. It’s to the left of the main altar of a Baroque basilica that was consecrated in 1748.
The statue, previously known as Our Lady of the Port, became known as Our Lady of the Miracles when this edifice was named for her.
Like many such older pieces, the statue is drowning in Baroque frippery, even as you get close. I’m pretty sure those aren’t Mary’s original hands, and the Child is dubious, as well. But if you look beyond the clothing, crescent moon, crown, and headpiece, underneath it all, the image could hardly be simpler.
It’s described as Gothic, but the extreme symmetry of the Mother and Child suggests it’s Romanesque or at least an old-fashioned Gothic.
I tried to imagine where the statue came from and how it traveled with Alfonso X — in a saddlebag? On a cart with other necessary items for the royal household? In the careful arms of a priest? Imponderables a historical novelist must always ponder.
What made this image so miraculous? The answer is the same as usual: history and politics.
Al-Qanatir, since the tenth century, was a fishing village with a lot of good agricultural land around it. Though it wasn’t much of an urban center, Alfonso X found its placement at the mouth of the Guadalete River highly strategic for his military operations.
Once it was definitively conquered for Castile in 1264, the king wanted to use Al-Qanatir as a foothold in the south and a base from which to launch campaigns on land and by sea.
In order to do that, he needed a stable settlement with commerce and agriculture. The area was rife with natural attractions, but it was farther south than some merchants and families might’ve wanted to venture on their own.
So Alfonso X erased all the potential dangers of Al-Qanatir by pointing to the statue of St. Mary he’d brought with him. She could solve any problem that arose for her devotees.
He quickly consolidated the power of this image by having his troubadours write down the many miracles she had already performed after her arrival in the town that was named for her.
And not just write down, but set to catchy music within the collection of the Cantigas de Santa María. I will explore this incredible set of songs, almost a concerto in its own right, in another post.
Having glimpsed the Virgin Mary who started it all, I went for my tour of the attractive castle where Alfonso X wrote his poems and music and planned his military ambushes.
As soon as the guided tour started at the castle’s front door, I was disabused of that notion. The king wouldn’t have used San Marcos for those purposes because it was not, in fact, a castle.
It never had been. It never would be.
If not a castle, what is it? Some archaeological evidence suggests it was a villa during Roman times.
Cantiga 358 tells us that the seas were rough for a long time, so the builders of San Marcos couldn’t receive the stones they needed to continue construction. One of the workers showed the master builder a spot where large, perfectly squared stones were just lying in the ground, ready to be used for the walls.
The Virgin Mary receives credit for this great find in the song, but today we think they were from the ruins of a Roman villa.
During the time of Al-Qanatir, parts of this building that still survive served as the mosque for all the nearby settlements. These pieces include the arch of the front door (pictured close up above), most of the prayer area of the mosque, and the sahn or ablutions patio.
When Alfonso X’s people arrived, they needed a church for the miraculous image, and like many churches in thirteenth-century Spain, it was built on the site of the mosque.
You may have noticed that what looks like the homage tower has more sides than the other ones. This is because the tower has the church’s apse at its base and follows its geometry all the way up.
The church builders made use of the materials already there while adding many expensive towers. Because this was not just a church — it was a fortified church.
It was a place where settlers could go to mass, worship St. Mary, and hear her miracles. The grounds were probably used as a meeting place for the town council, the way many Romanesque churches were used in the north of Spain.
And in a pinch, the population could retreat into this church and withstand a siege for a while until reinforcements showed up.
I don’t know how often that kind of thing happened. But it was the fortified aspect that led people to start calling this church a castle.
During the Renaissance, the Dukes of Medinaceli remodeled the structure into a palace, adding to the fortifications with the curtain wall we see today. Each stage of the complex was always built in harmony with the existing structures.
The Renaissance builders didn’t make changes to the church itself. They preserved it as a chapel in comparison to the enormous churches being constructed all around them.
Over time, especially after the miraculous Virgin was transferred to her own basilica, the palace became neglected. The towers started to crumble, and the Renaissance curtain wall to the right of the door was totally gone. People used the open space for the weekly market.
Then the 1980s rolled around, and some studious people who were wild about the legacy of Alfonso X decided to restore the fortified church to its former glory.
The curtain wall became whole again. The towers were stabilized, beautified, and painted with the striking castles and lions and Gothic lettering.
They installed stained glass featuring Alfonso X and scenes in the style of the Cantigas de Santa María in the church.
The 1980s renovation wasn’t the first one in the twentieth century. At the main altar, the guide asked us to guess whether the image of the Virgin and Child was new or medieval. The muted color palette and crisp lines of the carving led me to lean toward it being a modern piece.
Wrong! It’s a Gothic statue. This Virgin and Child, dated to Alfonso X’s reign, are known as Santa María la Blanca. They replaced Our Lady of the Miracles when she left for her own basilica so that the church could continue to have services.
The image was hidden when an eighteenth-century altarpiece was installed. It came to light during early twentieth-century interventions, when it was heavily restored and painted to early twentieth-century tastes.
All its medievalness has been covered up, erased. It is beautiful, granted. It’s an improvement over the way they found it. And you could say that it gives visitors now the kind of fresh-and-lovely impression people would’ve gotten when the piece was new in the thirteenth century.
Thankfully, art restoration has moved on from this kind of drastic action. Today, even a piece in as poor shape as this one would leave more to the imagination in an effort not to erase its history.
During the early twentieth-century remodel, the crew discovered that the thirteenth-century artisans had covered up the qibla (the wall in the direction of Mecca) and the mihrab (the chamber that focuses even more on Mecca) from the mosque, leaving them intact inside the church wall.
The mihrab is the most jaw-dropping part of the remodel. But everything apart from the basic structure — the chamber itself and its arched doorway — is a fantasy.
The mihrab is covered with embossed leather, which was a highly prized interior design trend in the early twentieth century, but not remotely medieval. The leather is painted with geometric and plant motifs in the style of William Morris.
From farther back, it gives the general impression of historical plausibility. And yes, it’s gorgeous. The mihrab, too, probably comes close to the aesthetic reactions the original piece must’ve provoked.
Our guide had a master’s degree in architecture, and he transmitted his love for this unique space in a captivating way. I found the history of the building as he explained it fascinating, and my main goal of the day became to purchase a book packed with glossy photos that provided scholarly resources on El Puerto de Santa María.
I’m told on a regular basis that I look like a tourist. But no, a quick walk around historical monuments never satisfies me. Especially in the case of this place, which was the apple of Alfonso X’s eye, give me the smallest details piled up on each other with photos, references, and essays.
So after I’d snooped in every corner open to the public after the tour, I followed the signs for the gift shop.
The only items for sale were related to the bodega (winery) in the basement of San Marcos. This is the land of sherry, so I’m not sure why I expected anything else.
Since I live in a place with plenty of its own bodegas and had been to the famous Tio Pepe bodega with my mom just a few months prior, this was the only type of history of El Puerto that failed to interest me.
I looked around town, but never found any books that filled my heart’s desire. I know they exist. San Marcos itself has been the site of scholarly conferences about Alfonso X.
If I wanted the books that came out of the conferences, I would have to visit a library.
No matter how far you go in the name of research, you always come back around to a library in the end.
