Castillogrande

This guide to Castillogrande in Cartagena follows the engineer Juan de Herrera y Sotomayor, who in 1728 spent thirteen years rebuilding a fort on this spit of land inside the bay after the French had already torn it apart. It traces the fortress back further, to its 1608 royal decree and 1630s construction under engineers Tiburcio Spanoqui, Cristobal de Roda and Francisco de Murga, and forward to 1640, when Spain sealed the bay's mouth with a wall of its own and made the fort's whole purpose obsolete overnight. Listen for how a stronghold built to guard the bay's entrance ended up patching itself together for a war that had already moved elsewhere.