“Ruin nursery with quarry trade.” The architect Ignacio Gil Crespo uses the analysis that the art critic Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño used in the early 1950s to gauge the health of Spanish castles. “When you visit a town where the castle is a bit ruined, it is very easy to see some of its pieces in the houses,” describes the specialist, member of the commission of the National Defensive Architecture Plan. Although today the general state of the fortresses remains generally dilapidated, some things have changed in the last century. “We have had 800 or 1,000 years of abandonment and 100 of awareness and restoration,” he says. However, the lack of information continues to weigh on the national landscape – inseparable from towers, walls, battlements and barbicans. To avoid the progressive death of the fortifications, the country must first know how many there are and where they are, but the successive attempts to count them, classify them and specify their state of conservation have not yet been completed. “There is still no definitive inventory, many times we don’t even know what they are,” laments Gil Crespo.
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