Castillo de San Marcos at Dusk, El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz Spain
Blue hour does the heavy lifting in this frame. The sky still holds a band of salmon-pink cloud fading into deep blue, with a thin crescent moon caught just above the fortress's tallest tower. Below, the plaza's paving carries its own geometry: a pale eight-pointed star inlaid into the dark gravel, echoing the Islamic star patterns the castle itself was built over. A long exposure has softened the handful of people crossing the square into gentle blurs, while the wrought-iron lampposts along both sides burn a warm, steady orange against the cooling stone.
Photographer: Sapiens Verbum (Pablo Avanzini)
Subject: Castillo de San Marcos (Castle of Alfonso X El Sabio) at dusk
Location: El Puerto de Santa María, Cádiz, Andalusia, Spain
Medium: Photograph – Colour
Series: Cadiz
The castle standing behind that star-patterned plaza is older than it looks from the square. King Alfonso X of Castile took El Puerto de Santa María from the Almohads around 1264 and, rather than build from nothing, converted the town's mosque into a fortified church dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The mosque's qibla wall — the wall that once oriented worshippers toward Mecca — still stands inside, mihrab and all, making the castle one of the clearer places in Andalusia where you can read a building's Islamic and Christian layers stacked directly on top of one another.
Its silhouette is built from four towers, two hexagonal and two square, whose crenellated tops give the skyline its jagged, storybook profile in this shot. Inside, the ground floors of the hexagonal towers once formed the chapel of the Virgin of Miracles, roofed with esquifada vaults, and a Gothic sacristy was added in the fifteenth century. The castle fell out of use once a newer church took over the parish's needs, closed its doors in 1868, and sat quietly until a 1940s restoration brought it back; it was declared a national monument in 1920. Today the local winery Bodegas Caballero owns the building, which now hosts an academic chair on the works of Alfonso X and an annual medieval music festival.
There is also a quieter historical thread tied to this square. Christopher Columbus visited El Puerto de Santa María in 1480, twelve years before his first Atlantic crossing, and it was here that he met Juan de la Cosa — the mariner and cartographer who would later sail with him and, in 1500, draw the first known map to include the coastline of the New World. A small fountain near the castle still holds a replica of that map, a reminder that this modest square once had a hand in how Europe first pictured America.
Get Castle of San Marcos, Puerto de Santa Maria, Cadiz Spain as a museum-quality print, canvas, or poster, or license the digital file for your own project.
Buy Fine Art Print License Photograph
Part of the Cadiz series.
Comments
Post a Comment