Martos

Human settlement at Martos goes back to the Palaeolithic, drawn by the natural spring water and the defensive height of La Peña, the great rock that still defines the town. By the Iberian period, a substantial fortified city called Tucci had formed here, complex enough to leave behind major cemeteries — those of El Sapillo and Santa Isabel — whose finds are held in the museum of the Colegio San Antonio de Padua. Under Rome, Tucci became a full colony, Augusta Gemella Tuccitana, established during the reign of Augustus.

Mosaics, coins, marble portraits and inscribed stone slabs survive from that era; the most important collection of Roman inscriptions is set into the façade of the town hall. In the late Roman period Martos was an episcopal seat, a role it kept through the Visigothic era. After the Islamic conquest of 711, the town — known to the Arabs as Tuš — became one of the most contested frontier strongholds in al-Andalus, valued for its fertile land and natural defences.

That frontier pressure shaped the castle on La Peña and the walls and towers of the lower Castillo de la Villa, which the Order of Calatrava would later reinforce against the Kingdom of Granada.

The most striking civic building in Martos is the former prison and town council hall, designed in the sixteenth century by Francisco del Castillo and put into use in 1557. It is regarded as a key work of Andalusian Mannerism and now serves as the town hall. Del Castillo also designed the ornamental fountain known as the Pilar de la Fuente Nueva, a Renaissance Mannerist piece originally set into the wall of the Plaza San Francisco and now standing at the junction of Avenida Miraflores and Avenida Pierre Cibié.

The Castillo de la Villa, built by the Order of Calatrava on a rocky hill that was once the acropolis of Roman Tucci and later an Islamic fortified stronghold, forms one half of Calatrava's principal defensive line against Granada. Fragments of the old town walls survive, including the Torre Almedina, Torre del Homenaje and Torre Albarrana, recently restored. A separate Calatrava stronghold, the Castillo de la Encomienda de Víboras, sits beside the Víboras river near the village of Las Casillas. A Roman bridge over the Arroyo Salado also survives on the edge of town.

The parish church of Santa Marta was built over the ruins of a mosque after Fernando III of Castile took the town in 1225. By tradition it holds the remains of the Carvajal brothers, knights of Calatrava executed here in 1312 on the orders of Fernando IV. Beside it stands a chapel with baroque frescoes attributed to Antonio García Reinoso. The Monasterio de la Santísima Trinidad, a closed Trinitarian convent, was founded in 1595 and has a Tuscan-order Renaissance doorway. Of the former Franciscan convent on the Plaza de la Fuente Nueva, only the baroque portal survives. The historic centre as a whole was declared a protected cultural asset in 2003.