You might not know, but it is possible that you have seen the streets of Pedraza on the television or cinema a few times. There are not many walled towns in Spain that are so perfect for shooting films set in other times. Isabelle, Land of Wolves, Toledo or El pícaro are some of them, but, as always, fiction is widely surpassed by reality in this scenario full of arches, noble houses and Renaissance flavour.
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You might not know, but it is possible that you have seen the streets of Pedraza on the television or cinema a few times. There are not many walled towns in Spain that are so perfect for shooting films set in other times. Isabelle, Land of Wolves, Toledo or El pícaro are some of them, but, as always, fiction is widely surpassed by reality in this scenario full of arches, noble houses and Renaissance flavour.
About the origins of Pedraza, there is studies and speculations, but nothing is for sure. It could’ve been a fortified town of Celtic type, and it could also have been the cradle of the mother of Trajan, the first Roman Emperor born in Spain. There are even some who maintain that Trajan himself was born here and not in Italica as it is usually said. Anyway, there is hardly anything left of those times, because Pedraza, repopulated after the Reconquest, did not look the way it looks today until the sixteenth century.
It would not take you long to go through it, so you can stand in every corner and use your imagination a little. In the medieval prison, however, it is almost better not to imagine with too much detail the horrors that went on those times. We warn you…
But in the Castle, you can. The magnificent Castle of Pedraza has been the witness of many stories, as we expect of a castle, but perhaps the most remembered is the one which led two Princes of France to be inside as hostages of Charles V.
The one from Habsburg had some disputes with the French monarch Francis I, and he managed to get his hands on him after the battle of Pavía, in 1525. He took him as a prisoner for a little while, just enough to make him sign a few things that Francis promised to respect if they released him.
But the Emperor was no fool and didn’t trust him, so he demanded from his rival for his two oldest sons to be brought over, and they would remain, as forced guests, on Spanish lands to guarantee that their father would keep his word.
The two boys crossed paths with their father in the Bidasoa, and he would not see them again until four years later as they went into captivity between the walls of Charles V. They spent most of that time in this castle of Pedraza, while the news of how their father was not keeping his word reached them. But that, as you know, is another story.
Four hundred years after that, the castle was bought by the painter Ignacio Zuloaga who, after giving it a good facelift, installed his workshop in it.
