Ponferrada

Overview

Ponferrada is the capital of El Bierzo, a town of 63,444 people in the far west of Castile and León, built around a Templar castle that covers 8,000 square metres on a promontory above the river Sil. The castle is the reason most people stop, and it is worth the stop: two circuits of wall walkways, a ruined 14th-century keep you can climb, and a 15th-century palace excavated and re-roofed over the last thirty years.

The name is literal. Around 1090 Bishop Osmundo had an iron-reinforced bridge thrown across the Sil so pilgrims could cross, and the Pons Ferrata gave the settlement that grew beside it its name. Ponferrada is still a Camino town: the 23rd stage of the Camino Francés runs through the municipality, the walking is flat and easy here, and the municipal hostel sits in the upper town a few metres from the castle gate. From April to September you will be sharing the old quarter with people carrying poles.

The municipality is much bigger than the built-up town: 34 separate settlements and close to seventy thousand residents spread over 283 square kilometres, with the Sil and the Boeza meeting inside the city limits. Monte Pajariel rises straight out of the southern edge of town, and behind it the Montes Aquilianos are a protected bird area holding golden eagle, eagle owl and peregrine falcon.

Coal and electricity ran this place for most of the 20th century and then stopped. What followed is tourism, wine and food. El Bierzo carries an unusual density of protected labels for a comarca this size: DO Bierzo for its wines and its reineta apples, protected geographical indication for botillo and for roasted peppers, guarantee marks for conference pears, chestnuts and cherries. Mencía is the red grape you will be offered by default.

Las Médulas, the Roman gold workings inscribed by UNESCO in 1997, are about 25 km away and are what turns Ponferrada from a lunch stop into a weekend. The town itself costs nothing to walk: the castle and the four municipal museums are the only things you pay for, and everything else, the Arco del Reloj, the Encina square, the riverbank under the castle walls, is just streets.

History

The rock the castle stands on was occupied in the first Iron Age, and the reason is obvious once you look down: a promontory with the steep bank of the Sil on one side. In the first half of the 12th century the hillfort was ringed with a wall of stone and clay, and that perimeter is the one the castle still follows today.

The Templars arrived in 1178, granted the site by the kings of León, and found a small fortress. They enlarged it to defend the pilgrim road, and the work was finished in 1282. Their job was partly military and partly political: protect the road to Santiago de Compostela, serve the interests of Fernando II and Alfonso IX, and stop Galician and Leonese nobles fighting over the crossing. They held it for a century and a half, building a convent, dwellings, cellars, granaries and gardens inside the walls, almost none of which survives.

The end came by paperwork. In late 1307 the Pope ordered every Templar arrested and their property seized; the Castilian master Rodrigo Yáñez went to Valladolid and agreed with queen mother María de Molina to hand over the Order’s castles. Ponferrada passed to the Crown in 1308, and the Order was dissolved by Clement V in 1312. Fernando IV died that September in Jaén, which is how he collected the nickname “el Emplazado”, the Summoned.

Almost everything you now walk through is later than the Templars. In 1340 Alfonso XI gave the lordship to Pedro Fernández de Castro, who began the Castillo Viejo at one end of the enclosure with the Torre del Homenaje Viejo; his family arms are still in the stonework. When that line failed the property returned to the Crown and then to the Duke of Arjona, who added his own semicircular tower.

The man who made the castle what it is was Pedro Álvarez Osorio, first Count of Lemos, who married the Duke of Arjona’s heiress and spent the 15th century building. The five towers standing today, Moclín, Caracoles, Cabrera, Malvecino and Malpica, are his, along with the main gate and its defences, the wall walkways, the tunnel down to the Sil known as the Cueva la Mora, and the Palacio Nuevo raised over 12th-century Templar footings. He died at Cornatel on 19 February 1483, and the fight over his estate brought in the Catholic Monarchs, who seized the fortress and ran it through a Crown-appointed corregidor.

From 1558 the lordship sat with the Marquises of Villafranca, who spent nothing on it, and the walls and towers of the Castillo Viejo decayed for three centuries. Stone was quarried out of it for other buildings, and houses, yards and cellars crept into the outer ditch and undermined the foundations. In 1848 the neoclassical building called Las Cuadras went up between the Malvecino and Malpica towers, using stone carted from the old Convento del Carmen, to serve the market that used to run there. It is now the tourist office.

Alfonso XIII granted Ponferrada the title of city on 4 September 1908, and the mining decades followed. Parliament approved the Ponferrada to Villablino railway on 24 July 1918 to move coal out of the Sil basin, MSP and Endesa set up here, and the town grew around them. The castle, meanwhile, hit bottom. In 1923 someone levelled a football pitch inside the walls; the following year it was declared a national monument, which stopped further damage without funding any repair.

It was closed to the public in 1994 because parts of it were about to fall down. The recovery ran off a Plan Director drawn up that year by the architect Fernando Cobos Guerra, which cleared the houses stuck to the walls, the last of them in 2000, and finished restoring the Palacio Nuevo rooms in 2010. The Camino recovered on a similar timetable, and in 1987 the Council of Europe named it the first European Cultural Itinerary.

Visiting

The castle opens from 10:00 to 14:00 every morning it opens at all, and the afternoon session shifts with the season: 16:30 to 20:30 from 1 April to 30 September, 16:00 to 19:00 in October and March, 16:00 to 18:00 from 1 November to 28 February. It closes on Mondays. The ticket desk shuts half an hour before the monument does, the average visit runs about 90 minutes, and dogs are not allowed in. Adult entry is 6 euros, the reduced rate is 4 euros, and under-14s go free.

The route is two loops, and the signage assumes you will follow it. Past the main gate you start along the Ronda Baja, the lower wall walk, from the Torre de los Caracoles round to the Torre de Malpica, then turn into the rebuilt Castillo Viejo. From there the Ronda del Sil takes you to the Torre de Moclín, where the permanent exhibition covers what daily life in a castle actually involved. That closes the first loop.

The second loop runs along the Ronda Alta to the Torre Malvecino, then down a staircase into the palloza area and in through the Palacio Nuevo. That palace is roughly 4,000 square metres built by the first Count of Lemos between the Cabrera and Malvecino towers, arranged round a U-shaped courtyard that only came to light in the 1998 excavations. On one side of the courtyard are the Sala de los Hombres Buenos with the stub of its chimney and, above it, what was the Sala Rica. On the other side the cellar occupies the old Templar chapel, and above that the Sala de Armas has been re-roofed with a timber structure worth a look up.

Inside the palace, the Templum Libri exhibition and the Biblioteca Templaria hold facsimiles and old books donated to the town by Antonio Ovalle García. The library occupies the former Sala de los Azulejos, named for the 15th-century ceramic tiles brought from Manises that once lined it.

Everything else in the old quarter is within ten minutes on foot. The tourist office is in Las Cuadras at C/ Gil y Carrasco 4, facing the Radio Museum, open Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:30 to 18:30, Sunday mornings only. Uphill from it is the Plaza de la Encina and the basilica of the patron of El Bierzo, known locally as la Morenica, a building drawn out across the 16th to 18th centuries whose 17th-century main retablo is the thing to look at inside. The Radio Museum sits at Gil y Carrasco 7 in the Casa de los Escudos, an 18th-century mansion with a wisteria that flowers over the facade every spring.

From the Plaza del Ayuntamiento, finished around 1700 to a design by Pero de Arén, the Arco del Reloj is the only surviving gate of the medieval wall and leads into Calle del Reloj. The Museo del Bierzo is at number 5, in a 16th-century building that served in turn as council chamber, town prison and the judge’s house, and its collection runs from the Palaeolithic to industrial archaeology with a whole room on the castle. The three central museums keep the same hours as the castle but close on Sunday afternoons as well as Mondays.

La Fábrica de Luz, twenty minutes downhill at Avenida de la Libertad 46, is the exception to every timetable above: Tuesday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00 from September to June, 10:00 to 20:00 in July and August, with no midday break. The permanent exhibition is 3 euros, guided tours of the old MSP power station are 5 euros and leave at 11:00, 13:00 and 16:30, with an extra 18:30 tour in summer.

Tips

• Come on a Wednesday if you can. Castle entry is free to everyone every Wednesday the monument opens, a legal consequence of its status as a Bien de Interés Cultural, and it is also free for all on 23 April, 12 October and 6 December.

• Carrying a current pilgrim credencial gets you the 4 euro rate, as does a youth card, a student card, an unemployment card or a pensioner card. Show the document at the desk; they will ask for it.

• Watch the ticket desk, not the closing time. It shuts thirty minutes before the monument does, and the visit takes about 90 minutes, so arriving at 13:15 for a 14:00 break means being moved along.

• Monday is the wrong day. The castle and all four municipal museums close, and the museums also shut on Sunday afternoons. La Fábrica de Luz closes Mondays too, so a Monday here is a walking day: the old quarter, the riverbank and Monte Pajariel.

• If you hold a Norwegian, Icelandic or Liechtenstein identity document, the castle is free. The town grants it in acknowledgement of the EEA Grants money those three countries put into the restoration.

• Climb the Cubo Nuevo in the Castillo Viejo. The spiral stair inside it comes out on a roof terrace with the panorama over the town, and plenty of visitors walk past the door without noticing it.

• Dogs cannot come into the castle, so plan around that before you drive in with one.

• Book La Fábrica de Luz around a guided tour rather than turning up. The tours leave at fixed times and cost 5 euros against 3 for the exhibition alone, and the old power station makes very little sense unguided.

• The 8th and 9th of September are the local holiday for the Encina festival. La Fábrica de Luz closes both days, so check opening hours before planning anything indoors that week.

• Walking on to Galicia in winter, take the Camino de Invierno. It is signposted from the cruceiro beside the municipal hostel, follows the Sil around Monte Pajariel and avoids the high ground of the French route.