Castro Duro has a great many streets, as many as an important capital.
By only circling the Square one can count the Main Street, Laurel
Street, Christ Street, Merchants’ Street, Forge Street, Shoemakers’
Street, Loafing Street, Penitence Wall, and Chain Street.
These streets are built with large brick houses and small adobe houses.
Pointed cobbles form the pavement, and leave a dirty open sewer in the
middle.
The large houses have two granite columns on their facades, on either
side of the door, and these columns as well as the stones of the
threshold take on a violet tinge from the lees of wine the inhabitants
have the custom of putting on the sidewalks to dry.
Many of the big houses in Castro boast a large ‘scutcheon over the door,
little crazy towers with iron weather-cocks on the roof; and some of
them a huge stork’s nest.
The streets remote from the centre of town have no paving, and their
houses are low, built of adobe, and continued by yards, over whose
mud-walls appear the branches of fig-trees.
These houses lean forward or backward, and they have worn-out balconies,
staircases which hold up through some prodigy of stability, and old
grills, crowned with a cross and embellished with big flowers of wrought
iron.
The two principal monuments of Castro Duro are the Great Church and the
palace.
The Great Church is Romanesque, of a colour between yellow and brown,
gilded by the sun. It stands high, at one extremity of the hill, like a
sentinel watching the valley. The solid old fabric has rows of crenels
under the roof, which shows its warlike character.
The principal dome and the smaller ones are ribbed, like almost all the
Romanesque churches of Spain.
The round apse exhibits ornamental half columns, divers rosettes, and a
number of raised figures, and masonic symbols. In the interior of the
church the most notable thing to be seen is the Renaissance altar-piece
and a Romanesque arch that gives entrance to the baptistery.
The second archeological monument of the town is the ancient palace of
the Dukes of Castro Duro.
The palace, a great structure of stone and now blackened brick, rises at
the side of the town-hall, and has, like it, an arcade on the Square. In
the central balcony there are monumental columns, and on top of them
two giants of corroded stone, with large clubs, who appear to guard the
‘scutcheon; one end of the building is made longer by a square tower.
The palace wears the noble air given to old edifices by the large spread
of wall containing windows very far apart, very small, and very much
ornamented.
From the inscriptions on its various escutcheons one can gather that it
was erected by the Duke of Castro Duro and his wife, Doña Guiomar.
In the rear of the palace, like a high belvedere built on the rampart,
there appears a gallery formed of ten round arches, supported on slender
pilasters. Below the gallery are the remains of a garden, with ramps and
terraces and a few old statues. The river comes almost to the foot of
the gardens.
Today the palace belongs to Don Calixto García Guerrero, Count de la
Sauceda.
Don Calixto and his family have no necessity for the whole of this big
palace to live in, and have been content to renovate the part fronting
on the Calle Mayor. They have had new belvederes built in, and have
given over the apartments looking on the Square and the Calle del Cristo
to the Courts and the school.
Another great building, which astonishes every one that stops over at
Castro Duro, by its size, is the Convent of la Merced. It has been half
destroyed by a fire. In the groins there remain some large Renaissance
brackets, and in one wing of the edifice, inhabited by the nuns, there
are windows with jalousies and a rather lofty tower terminating in a
weather-cock and a cross.