Xàtiva Castle

The castle of Xàtiva  occupies the top of the mountain on which the city sits. Divided into two large enclosures, the Major Castle and the Minor Castle, it is a great fortress built by the Muslims on previous Iberian, Carthaginian and Roman buildings.

After the Christian conquest, the Muslim Medina Xateva  underwent various modifications. The earthquake of the 18th century and the War of Independence left its structure very damaged, whose restoration was undertaken in the 20th century.

From both castles there are remains of the wall that, from both sides, descended and embraced the city. The castle had thirty towers and twelve well-distributed cisterns that supplied all the rooms with water.

The castle of Xàtiva was used, from the 13th to the 16th century, as a royal prison. Several dependencies were used as a residence-prison for personalities, some of whom ended their lives there due to natural causes or by execution.

Such were the cases of the infantes de la Cerda (sons of Alfonso X el Sabio  and grandsons of Jaume I ), prisoners from 1278 to 1288, and don Jaime, count of Urgell, pretender to the crown of Aragon after the death of Martín the Human, who entered the cells in 1426, dying there seven years later.

Ferdinand, Duke of Calabria, a relative of Ferdinand II of Aragon, suffered the wrath of the king and ended up with his bones in the castle jail, according to historians, for alleged affairs with the then wife of the monarch, Germana de Foix, forty years younger than her husband.

Another illustrious condemned was Diego de Borja, canon of the cathedral of Valencia, accused of murder by Philip II and beheaded in the same castle in 1552.