Castillo de San Sebastián
Surviving north wall and two sentry boxes of Vigo's 17th-century fort, behind the city hall
Visit details
Overview
The Castillo de San Sebastián is what is left of a 17th-century fort in the upper part of Vigo’s old town: a run of north-facing wall with two stone sentry boxes, and nothing else above ground. A bastion and two half-bastions that had survived until the 20th century were pulled down so the city hall could be built on top of them. The remains sit behind that building, on Praza do Rei.
The fort went up on a hillock below O Castro, at the point where the walled perimeter of Vigo’s military plaza closed. The military engineers Juan Villarroel y Prado and the brothers Carlos and Fernando de Grunemberg were behind the work, which was ordered because Vigo needed defending against English pirates allied with the Portuguese during the Portuguese Restoration War of 1640 to 1668.
Set your expectations accordingly. This is not a castle visit: there are no gates, no rooms, no ticket, no route through anything. It is a piece of granite wall on a public square, listed as a Ben de Interese Cultural and owned by the city council. Ten minutes is about right, and it works best as a stop on the walk up to the Fortaleza do Castro rather than as a destination of its own.
The Camino Portugués da Costa runs past the site, so a fair share of the people looking at the wall are pilgrims on their way through the city rather than anyone who came for the fort.
History
This was the highest point of the medieval villa of Vigo, and it had been fortified long before the castle. The fortaleza do Penso stood here, belonging to the Archbishop of Santiago, lord of the town. Chronicles describe it as built of granite with lime mortar, battlemented, two or three storeys of wooden flooring, roofed in tile and wood, and ringed by its own wall and barbican.
The dynastic conflicts of the 15th century finished it off. Late in the century the Penso was taken by Pedro Álvarez de Soutomaior, better known as Pedro Madruga; once the archbishop had it back, he ordered it demolished rather than risk losing it again. Houses were then built over the site, and the high ground appears as the “montezillo alto” in the earliest known image of the town, dated 1597. That same image shows a chapel dedicated to San Sebastián, the saint invoked against plague, which may well have been built in response to the epidemics Vigo suffered around then.
The castle itself dates from 1656, when Philip IV ordered Vigo walled during the Portuguese Restoration War. The houses on the hillock came down and the fort went up in their place. The chapel that gave the castle its name ended up outside the new enclosure, which is why the saint’s name is the only part of it still attached to the site.
Juan de Villarroel y Prado drew up both this fort and the Castelo do Castro a few hundred metres uphill, and in 1665, the year Portugal besieged the town for six days, the engineers Carlos and Fernando de Grunemberg joined the two with a connecting wall finished by 1667.
Both castles and the wall between them were thrown up quickly and on a small budget, and it showed: no moat, no ravelins, and masonry that was never especially solid. For its first decades the fort housed nothing more than a guard post; the barrack blocks and other military buildings only arrived in the 19th century.
English forces invaded Vigo in 1719 and left the castle in ruins. It was reduced to holding livestock, and the town’s defence moved permanently uphill to the Castro. Worse followed on 28 March 1813, during the celebrations of the Reconquista, when the powder magazine blew up and brought down the collegiate church, already in a poor state.
Through the 19th century the ruin was adapted as a hospital, then served as a military barracks until 1964, when the army handed it over to the city. The decisive damage came after that. In 1970 the mayor Antonio Ramilo Fernández-Areal resolved to build a new city hall on the site, several stretches of the castle wall were knocked down for it, and work on the municipal building started in 1972.
The building and the square around it were inaugurated together on 26 July 1976. Even that was not the end of it: in 1983 the demolition of the part still standing was put on the table and dropped, and the 1990s remodelling of Praza do Rei, which added an underground car park, degraded the setting further.
Visiting
Walk into Praza do Rei and the fort is behind the city hall, not in front of it, which is why plenty of people cross the square without noticing it at all. What you are looking for is the north side: a length of wall with two garitas, the small stone sentry boxes corbelled out at the corners. That is the authentic 17th-century fabric. The bastion and two half-bastions that once stood alongside are underneath the municipal building.
A garita is worth a second look because it is the one feature that reads clearly as military architecture rather than as a retaining wall. Each is a round turret bracketed off the angle of the wall, giving a sentry a covered position with sightlines along two faces at once. On a fort built as cheaply as this one, with no moat and no ravelins, the garitas were doing a lot of the work.
There is nothing to enter and nothing to buy. The Turismo de Galicia listing for the site gives an address in Vigo and a description, and no opening hours, admission price or phone number, which matches what you find on the ground: an open piece of the square with no ticket desk and no staff. Come at any reasonable hour and the wall will be there.
Praza do Rei itself is pedestrian and easy to reach from several directions: steps connect it to the Ronda de Don Bosco, and a small footbridge links it to the Avenida das Camelias. The Auditorio Municipal is on the same square.
The square is the reason the site feels stranded. It was laid out as the setting for the new municipal building rather than around the fort, and the 1990s rebuild with its underground car park cut the remains off further from the streets below. Read the wall as the lower end of a defensive line rather than as a standalone monument and it makes more sense.
The obvious continuation is uphill to the Fortaleza do Castro, the sister fort designed by the same engineer and the place Vigo’s defence moved to after 1719. Doing the two in that order, low fort then high fort, is the only way the site really earns its place in a day in Vigo.
Tips
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Free, unfenced and unstaffed. The official Turismo de Galicia entry publishes no hours and no admission price, and there is no ticket office on site, so there is nothing to book and no best time to arrive for opening.
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Go round the back of the city hall. The remains are behind the municipal building on Praza do Rei, not on its main frontage.
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Know what is original before you look. Only the north wall and its two garitas survive; a bastion and two half-bastions were demolished and the city hall built over them.
That distinction matters more here than at most ruins, because the surroundings have changed twice over. Sections of wall came down in 1970 for the new municipal building, the demolition of what remained was considered again in 1983 and rejected, and the Praza do Rei remodelling of the 1990s reworked the ground around it.
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Pair it with the Fortaleza do Castro uphill. Same designer, Juan de Villarroel y Prado, and the two were linked by a wall completed in 1667.
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Do not expect a moat or outworks. There never were any: the walls were built fast and cheap and lacked both a ditch and ravelins from the start.
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Walking the Camino Portugués da Costa? The route passes the site, so it costs you no detour at all.
- Budget ten to fifteen minutes. There is no interior, no exhibition and no marked route, and the sensible plan is to see it on the way somewhere else in Vigo.
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