Search “most beautiful castles in Spain” and the Palacio Real de Olite shows up almost every time, usually with a caption calling it a “fairytale castle” in “northern Spain.” What that framing leaves out is what the building actually was: the working court of an independent kingdom, built by the same royal line that later unified Pamplona itself, sitting less than an hour’s drive from the city where San Fermín is celebrated every July.
That gap matters for anyone who already knows Pamplona. The king who commissioned most of what stands at Olite today, Carlos III el Noble, is the same monarch responsible for merging Pamplona’s three warring medieval boroughs into a single city in 1423, a unification that shaped the Casco Antiguo the encierro now runs through and that is documented in full on this site’s history of the Kingdom of Navarra. Treating Olite as a generic Spanish castle, disconnected from that history, misses the point of the building entirely.
This account draws on the Government of Navarra’s own tourism authority, Visit Navarra, the palace’s authorized visitor site, and the documented architectural history of the building, cross-checked against each other for every date, name, and figure below.
From a Roman Ruin to a Navarrese King’s Fortress
Before there was a palace at Olite, there was a Roman structure on the site, remains of a praetorium later built over by medieval construction. The first real castle rose in the 13th century under Sancho VII “el Fuerte” (the Strong), King of Navarra, the same king whose divided burial, heart at Ujué and body at Roncesvalles, is already documented elsewhere on this site. His successors, Theobald I and Theobald II, extended the fortress. Theobald II lived there in 1269, and it was at Olite that he signed the marriage consent for his brother’s wedding to Blanche of Artois, the union that would put Henry I on the Navarrese throne.
At this stage, Olite was not yet a fixed royal seat. Navarra’s medieval court traveled between residences as its kings preferred, and Olite was simply one stop among several. Charles II of Navarra, remembered as “el Malo” (the Bad), stayed there in 1380, 1381, and 1384, but the building remained closer to a fortified residence than a palace.
That changed with the next generation. What tourists photograph today, the towers, the galleries, the walls facing the Plaza de Carlos III, is almost entirely the product of one 22-year building campaign a generation later, and it is worth understanding Olite’s earlier, plainer castle first, because the contrast is the whole story of what Carlos III chose to build on top of it.
Carlos III el Noble Built an Extravagant Court, Not a Fortress
In 1402, King Carlos III el Noble and his wife, Leonor de Trastámara, ordered construction of what is now called the New Palace. Work began in earnest around 1406 under master builder Saúl de Arnedo and was substantially complete by 1424, a roughly 22-year project that gave the complex seven towers, a full defensive wall, multiple courtyards, and a level of interior decoration that had no equal in the kingdom.
Carlos III belonged to the French House of Évreux, and the building shows it. The exterior massing, with its steep towers, tall windows, and projecting balconies, follows French Gothic convention. The interior tells a different story: Mudéjar plasterwork, tilework, and carpentry, much of it executed by Muslim craftsmen brought from Tudela, alongside Catalan and French painters and Aragonese and Flemish glaziers. A 15th-century German traveler recorded his impressions of the palace in a diary now held at the British Museum, writing that he was certain no king anywhere had a more beautiful palace, “with so many golden rooms.”
The palace was built for comfort and display, not defense; both the New and the older Old Palace had walls and towers, but neither was intended as a working fortress. Hanging gardens, in places nearly 20 meters above ground, were irrigated through a lead-pipe system engineered starting in 1409 and expanded in 1414 by an Englishman, John Nelbort of Bristol. The grounds held an exotic menagerie: a lion, a gift from King Peter IV of Aragón, alongside a camel, hunting hawks and hounds, African buffalo, and, remarkably for 15th-century Navarra, a giraffe. A white mulberry tree in the palace’s Morera courtyard, said by tradition to have been planted personally by Carlos III, still stands and has been declared a Natural Monument of Navarra for its age.
The tallest of the seven towers, the Torre del Homenaje, rises roughly 40 meters and is nicknamed the “Torre de la Vit” (French for snail) for the 133-step spiral staircase inside it, the only genuinely military feature in the entire complex. Nearby, the octagonal Torre de las Tres Coronas and the Torre de los Cuatro Vientos, where the royal family once watched tournaments, still offer views over the old town and the surrounding vineyards.
Fire, Ruin, and a 20th-Century Rebuild
In 1813, during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain, the Navarrese guerrilla commander Francisco Espoz y Mina set fire to the palace to keep French troops from fortifying it. The blaze gutted most of the interior. The adjoining Church of Santa María la Real, a separate Gothic building from the 13th century with a 16th-century Renaissance altarpiece attributed to Pedro de Aponte, survived largely intact, but the palace itself sat in ruin for more than a century, visited in that state by Romantic-era travelers who described its empty, roofless chambers.
Spain declared the ruin a National Monument in 1925. A full restoration began in 1937, led by architects José and Javier Yárnoz Larrosa and funded by the regional government of Navarra, and continued for roughly 30 years, finishing in 1967. Much of the original interior decoration and the historic gardens could not be recovered, but the exterior silhouette, the towers, and the structural core were rebuilt according to documented medieval form, which is what visitors walk through today.
What Olite Looks Like Today
The complex still splits into the same two parts it did in Carlos III’s time. The Old Palace, the earlier 13th-century core, is now a Parador de Turismo, Spain’s state-run heritage hotel network, operating under the name Príncipe de Viana on the Plaza de los Teobaldos, meaning it is possible to sleep inside a genuinely medieval Navarrese royal residence. The New Palace, Carlos III’s 15th-century addition, is the part open to ticketed visitors, with an exhibition inside the Great Tower called “Olite, throne of a kingdom.”
Olite itself is a small town, just over 3,000 residents, and the palace complex occupies roughly a third of the medieval old town’s footprint. Every August, the streets fill with the Fiestas Medievales de Olite, a costumed medieval market with craftsmen, jugglers, and falconers, and in late July and early August the palace walls become the backdrop for the Olite Theatre Festival. The town also functions as one of Navarra’s wine centers; Roman-era wine cellars have been uncovered nearby, the Enozentrum wine-culture center sits beside the town’s tourist office, and Bodegas Ochoa still makes wine a short walk from the palace walls.
40 Kilometers From Pamplona
The palace sits roughly 40 kilometers south of Pamplona, in Navarra’s Zona Media, close enough to visit as a half-day trip for anyone already in the city for San Fermín. The connection runs deeper than distance. Carlos III, the king who built the palace visitors see today, is the same monarch behind the 1423 Privilegio de la Unión, the charter that merged Pamplona’s three separate medieval boroughs, Navarrería, San Cernin, and San Nicolás, into one city government. That unification is part of what made Pamplona a single administrative city rather than three walled neighborhoods eyeing each other with suspicion, and it happened under the same king whose court sat at Olite. Carlos III is buried, alongside Queen Leonor, in Pamplona Cathedral, not at the palace he spent 22 years building.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Palacio Real de Olite?
The Palacio Real de Olite is a medieval castle-palace in the town of Olite, Navarra, built primarily between 1402 and 1424 by King Carlos III el Noble as the residential court of the independent Kingdom of Navarra. It sits on the site of an earlier 13th-century fortress and a Roman-era structure.
How far is Olite from Pamplona?
Olite is roughly 40 kilometers south of Pamplona, in Navarra’s Zona Media (Middle Zone), making it a realistic half-day round trip for visitors already based in Pamplona for San Fermín.
Can you stay overnight in the Olite castle?
Yes. The Old Palace, the earlier medieval core of the complex, now operates as a Parador de Turismo, Spain’s state-run network of heritage hotels, under the name Príncipe de Viana. The New Palace next door is the ticketed museum section open for daytime visits.
Who built the Royal Palace of Olite?
The bulk of the palace as it stands today was built by King Carlos III el Noble and Queen Leonor de Trastámara between 1402 and 1424. An earlier, smaller castle on the same site dates to the 13th-century reign of Sancho VII el Fuerte and was extended by his successors Theobald I and Theobald II.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.