Royal Palace of Olite

Few castles look as if they were drawn by a storyteller as convincingly as the royal palace of Olite. Its skyline is a crowd of towers of every height and profile, crenellated walls and slate-capped turrets rising over a small town in the plains of southern Navarre. For about a century, from the reign of Charles III "the Noble" until Castile absorbed the Kingdom of Navarre in 1512, this was one of the seats of the Navarrese court, and a German traveller of the fifteenth century wrote in his diary that he doubted any king owned a finer or more richly gilded palace.

The complex grew in two stages around the Gothic church of Santa María la Real. The Old Palace, a thirteenth-century building on the site of a Roman fortification, was enlarged under Sancho VII and the Theobald kings; today it houses a state-run Parador hotel. The New Palace was Charles III's project: works directed by Saúl de Arnedo began in 1406 and were largely finished by 1424, producing an irregular, many-angled mass of stone with numerous towers. French influence shows in the towers, windows and balconies, Hispanic craft in the coffered ceilings, tilework and plaster. The court also had hanging gardens set high above the ground, orange trees in an inner courtyard and a menagerie whose animals included a lion sent by Peter IV of Aragon and a giraffe. The church keeps its carved Gothic portal, a cloister of the same period and a sixteenth-century Renaissance altarpiece.

After 1512 the palace served the viceroys and then slid into neglect. In 1813, during the Peninsular War, the guerrilla leader Espoz y Mina set it on fire so that French troops could not use it, and only the church escaped serious damage. Restoration under the architects José and Javier Yarnoz Larrosa began in 1937 and lasted until 1967, funded by the government of Navarre, and gave the walls and towers back their medieval outline, though the interiors, with their gilded ceilings and tapestries, were lost. Visitors can still climb the spiral stair of the Torre del Homenaje, 133 steps from the first floor to the top.

Olite itself is a small walled town in the Navarrese wine country, its old quarter built around the two palace squares, Plaza de los Teobaldos and Plaza de Carlos III el Noble.

Getting there

The palace stands in the centre of Olite, about 37 km south of Pamplona. The nearest airport is Pamplona Airport (PNA), roughly 32 km away in a straight line.