A Day Tour To Colomares Castle in Benalmadena, Spain
Last weekend we visited one of the most interesting places in the south of Spain – Colomares Castle.
It is so unique that some will be tempted to confuse passion with madness when they see it for the first time. Dr. Esteban Martín and two masons built with their own hands a strange castle in Benalmádena (Málaga). His idea was to glorify the discovery of America by Hispanics. He left his career as a surgeon in the United States, studied, designed and built a kaleidoscopic monument that reproduces in stone what has been told so much in books. He dedicated 15 years of his life and all his heritage to complete the job. Today in Benalmadena you can see something that is neither a castle nor a sculpture, something to remember Christopher Columbus and his trip to the Indies.
From 1987 to 1994 Dr. Martin and two workers were busy in constructing an unclassifiable monument on a plot of land with great views of the sea. The Colomares Castle, that’s what it’s called, turns out to be something with a kitsch point. It mixes the Mudejar with the Romanesque, the flamboyant Gothic and oriental. On brick, stone, and cement, Martin and his two master stonemasons erected towers of 33 meters and outlined a reproduction of each of the three caravels. “It was not a job with a schedule. If they had to stay until 1 in the morning because at that time it was forging, they stayed,” remembers his son Carlos. The idea was to make a book in stone: “You have to have the imagination to carve this, how do you create the building so that it can be read? This seems anarchic but if you read the story it starts to make sense”.
Dr. Martin’s idea was to make the castle as an instrument of historical evidence. The surgeon was disappointed when he went to the streets of the United States on October 12 and observed a celebration based on a kind of historical fusion. The Italians used the supposed Genoese origin of Christopher Columbus as a pretext to arrogate merits to their country. And he, educated in a classic Spanish historiography, with traces of patriotic exaltation typical of the Franco regime, decided not to tolerate it. He went even further: according to his research, Christopher Columbus was not Genoese and you can find several allusions in the castle that the discoverer had a Jewish origin.
Dr. Martin began to plan his work at the beginning of the 80s, with a view to the celebration of the V Centennial. But stories of misunderstood passions need someone who is deaf. He never received any support, he wrote letters to the King asking for help, he didn’t receive any, but he did not stop believing in his work.
In 1994, first embarrassed and then jaded, he took refuge in the books to look for, his son recalls, words from old Castilian and the most extravagant synonyms, until the day he died. The castle was dedicated for a time to falconry and the meaning of the work was forgotten until his son recovered it and endowed it with content. It is not an element of patriotic exaltation or an instrument to hurt anyone, but an “aseptic history book,” says Carlos today.
