Castillo de Portilla

The Castillo de Portilla and the old town of Portilla (in Basque: Zabalateko gaztelua), in the municipality of Zambrana (Álava), was a territorial centre of the Kingdom of Pamplona that came into being in the 11th century. It was the scene of numerous Navarrese-Castilian clashes, until in the year 1200 it was handed over to Castile. Later, in 1288, it was the scene of a great siege by Sancho IV in the Castilian civil war that set him against his nephew Alfonso de la Cerda. Abandoned for centuries, a project for the integral recovery of the site, awarded the Hispania Nostra Prize 2016, makes it possible to visit this spectacular place. The rock castle, the old town, its church and walls constitute a landscape of enormous beauty that explains its status as a fortified town in a completely natural setting.

Machine-translated from “Castillo de Portilla” on the Spanish Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Castillo de Portilla ranks #6,296 of 7,044 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #395 of the 500 mapped in Spain. See how Spain compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Spanish) ↗