Zamora’s Medieval Castles: Small and Mighty Villalonso
One of the most ostentatious blessings of living in Spain for this castle-lover is that you can’t go far without spotting some kind of medieval military structure. The medieval kingdom (and today’s region) of Castile was named precisely for the surprising number of castles scattered all over it.
Though I don’t have a car, during my first year here, I had the opportunity to take a bus route regularly between Zamora and Tordesillas in Valladolid. Usually, it went along the speedy highway, without many sights beyond the the rolling countryside.
But sometimes, the bus took the long way through little pueblos and back roads, and that was when I first caught sight of Villalonso Castle.
There was no way to stop nearby. The image of the well-preserved fortress on the border of the two provinces with its unmistakable machicolations, just out of reach like a resin model on a high shelf, tormented me. I spent a few years wondering if I would have to take a taxi from Toro one day.
Until I found someone with a car willing to humor my fascination.
We went on a summer weekday that was convenient for the driver, and like most other such out-of-the-way monuments, the lack of planning ahead did not pay off. Villalonso Castle is privately owned, and it was so closed, you might think it was abandoned.
My companion recalled a time, during his wilder days, when his friends and he dug out the ground a little, slipped under the locked gate, and checked it out inside. Given that now, the ground beneath the gate was paved and cobbled, that was no longer an option even if I were to suddenly abandon all sense of propriety and respect.
A sign said it would be open on the weekend for just a couple of hours a day. I hated to put the driver out, but being there at the castle, touching its stones, and finding it sealed like a secret only increased my need to see what the small, solid package had on the inside.
So we returned on a torrid Sunday at the end of July 2020. This time, we parked in the pueblo and walked up to the castle, which had a couple of cars right next to it.
That seemed like a good sign, until we saw a spry man hurry away from the castle and hop into one of the cars, leaving a couple of bewildered Spaniards in his wake outside the door.
My companion asked them what had happened. Is it closed? Did we get the times wrong? No, they said. That was the caretaker, and he’d forgotten the key! He’d left it at his house in Valladolid, a good 60 km away.
I was determined to wait it out so I could see this castle, no matter how long it took. While we waited, my companion and I wandered around the well-maintained town.
Villalonso was granted its charter in 1147. It became a lordship in 1412 and the head of its own county in 1599. These honors are largely due to the importance of its castle through the centuries.
Sixteenth-century St. Mary church has an interesting coffered ceiling and altarpiece, but we didn’t see it because it was closed.
The Hermitage of the True Cross, which like many other such popular buildings, is hard to date architecturally, guards one of the entrances to the pueblo.
At some point, we noticed the native plants were kind of aggressive. (This is 2020 we’re talking about. Lest we forget, plants went wild with less human interaction that year.) After picking most of the stickers out of our flesh and footwear, we sat in the car to await the caretaker’s return.
The castle’s existence probably predates the town and was first built as a fort near the Portuguese frontier during the times of hottest dispute of the border, the twelfth century.
Its first cool feature is its location on the modern border of the province. From here, you can easily see Tiedra Castle in neighboring Valladolid. The rectangle on the horizon in the center of the photo is Tiedra.
If they were friendly, the castles could easily have sent signals to each other. We visited both on different days, and my companion said Tiedra could be his, and I could have Villalonso. I like both, but in that scenario, I definitely win.
By the thirteenth century, Villalonso belonged to the Order of Calatrava. King Enrique had it completely remodeled about 1454, and this is the castle we see today.
It’s a great example of the Valladolid School of castle-building: a rectangular plan with towers in each corner and a bigger, taller tower (homage tower or keep in English) that overlooks it all.
This sensible-seeming rectangularity is what makes Villalonso so impressive to look at. It’s exactly what you’d expect a Spanish castle to be, just like a castle model kit you might put together as a kid.
In this case, the Valladolid School renovation was meant more as a palace than as a fort, in spite of the awesome medieval military features that served it well in the sieges it was still to endure. The masonry has been carefully squared and is generally in a good state of repair to this day.
The only remains of the previous castle are the ruins of walls that made up an outer bailey. This feature was abandoned during the medieval renovation as unnecessary for a palace.
The ruins give the romantic feeling of past glory while we’re still able to enjoy the core of the castle in perfectly usable condition.
The Ulloa family, the lords of this castle in 1476, used it during the Battle of Toro to support the cause of Juana la Beltraneja against Isabel and Ferdinand. When the Catholic Monarchs won, they took the castle and many villages away from the Ulloa family.
Nevertheless, a member of the family got the castle back, only to support the cause of the comuneros, a fascinating and overlooked movement against Emperor Carlos V. That emperor condemned Ulloa to death, but he was able to buy his way out of the sentence.
Depending how you look at it, the Ulloa family was unlucky or pretty lucky with this castle.
The castle remained in the hands of the Ulloa family for most of the modern era, but the most interesting transaction took place in 1984. The castle was in much poorer condition than it is now, and the parents of brother and sister Jesús and Elizabeth Cueto Vallejo bought it from the Duchess of Osuna, doña Ángela María Téllez Girón.
With great care and enthusiasm, the Cuetos had the castle restored and used for certain events. By 2011, it opened to the public for tourist visits like the one I was attempting to make in 2020.
Only 45 to 50 minutes after he’d left, the caretaker ripped back into the parking space next to the castle. The highway on a Sunday in 2020 had probably been empty and let him speed to his heart’s content.
He burst out of his car, a bundle of nervous energy, and when we approached, I believe he thought we were the other couple he’d spoken to before. They’d left shortly after he did. Obviously not diehard castle enthusiasts like me. Another couple with impeccable timing joined us just as the caretaker opened the door.
We all paid the paltry entry fee, and it wasn’t long before we realized he was no mere caretaker. He was the owner, Jesús Cueto.
This dynamo peppered the wonderfully detailed tour of the homage tower and battlements with medieval history and with personal stories of past events, how they decided what to restore, and to what extent.
The restoration took a long time because most of the budget had been spent on the castle itself. They received about half the budget from an organization in favor of cultural heritage.
Sadly, Jesús told us his sister had passed away, and he wasn’t certain about the future of the castle. It’s a lot for one person to look after, especially when that person lives in Valladolid and has other interests, too. It turned out Jesús is a renowned film historian.
We conversed with Jesús long after the other couple left. My companion connected with him about classic movies.
Villalonso Castle appears in the first few scenes of the 1966 movie Robin and Marion with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn. It stands in for a castle in the Holy Land. The restrooms use photos of the actors in the movie rather than standard “men” and “women” signs.
I adored getting to know so many details of this castle. Knowing its small structure holds so many interesting corners satisfied me in a way other castles in Zamora province haven’t been able to.
As we drove back to Zamora, I told my companion (okay, yes, he was my boyfriend at the time) he should make friends with Jesús based on their shared love of cinema, and then Jesús would sell him Villalonso Castle for a friendly bargain price.
He replied no, I should marry Jesús to become the castle’s owner. I told him it wasn’t funny because I was all in with this boyfriend. But throughout the 40-minute drive, he didn’t let it go.
In hindsight, his hilarious idea to fob me off on someone else for the sake of a castle was a neon sign that the relationship was on its last legs.
But that’s a different story.
Check out my virtual tour of Villalonso’s neighbor, Tiedra Castle.
I found some of the facts in this article here.
Other facts came from here.
