Olite
"Olite is proof that a medieval king with money and no restraint can leave behind something better than good taste — he can leave behind wonder."
A small Navarrese town built almost entirely around one preposterous, fairy-tale royal castle, with a wine region quietly doing serious work outside its walls.
You see the towers before you see the town. The Palacio Real de Olite rises out of a modest skyline of red-tiled roofs like something drawn for a children’s book — a jumble of turrets, crenellations, and slender towers that Charles III of Navarre, “the Noble,” began building in the early 15th century and never really stopped adding to. He’d traveled through France and reportedly wanted a residence to rival what he’d seen there, and what resulted is one of the most extravagant pieces of civil Gothic architecture left standing in Spain, closer in spirit to the Loire Valley than to the more austere Castilian fortresses you find elsewhere in the country.
I climbed the Torre de los Cuatro Vientos, the tallest of the towers, on a clear autumn morning and could see across the whole of the Ribera navarra — vineyards running out toward the horizon in neat green rows, the Sierra del Perdón a low blue line in the far distance. The castle itself lost its roofs to a fire during the Napoleonic Wars in 1813, when Spanish forces burned it to keep it from French use, and much of what stands today is a 20th-century restoration — a fact that disappoints some purists but didn’t bother me at all. Reconstructed or not, walking through the queen’s hanging gardens, said to have once held a menagerie of lions and other exotic animals kept purely to impress visiting dignitaries, gives you a real sense of a court that had more ambition than restraint.
A Town Built to Serve the Castle
The town around the palace grew up specifically to serve the Navarrese court, and its medieval layout still shows it — narrow stone streets radiating out from the castle and the adjoining Iglesia de Santa María la Real, whose portal is carved with a density of Gothic figures that took me a full ten minutes just to look at properly. Olite still holds the title of a former royal seat with quiet pride: the tourism office sits inside part of the old palace complex, and the whole town, only a few thousand residents, feels a little like it’s still keeping the lights on for a court that left six centuries ago.
Wine Underground
What surprised me most wasn’t the castle but what’s underneath the town: a network of medieval bodegas, wine cellars carved directly into the rock beneath Olite’s streets, some dating back centuries and still used or preserved as part of the town’s identity as a hub of Navarra DO wine production. This is garnacha country primarily, along with increasing amounts of tempranillo, and I toured one of the cellar complexes with a guide who pointed out ventilation shafts poking up through what looked, from street level, like ordinary chimneys. Above ground, the annual grape harvest festival still structures the town’s calendar the way it must have for the vintners who once supplied the royal court itself.
I ended the day the way most visitors seem to: a glass of cold Navarra rosado on a terrace in the main square, watching the castle’s silhouette go from honey-colored to black as the light dropped behind it, thinking that Charles the Noble, whatever else you say about him, understood how to build a view.
When to go: September and October coincide with the grape harvest and bring warm, golden light for the castle towers; spring is a quieter, greener alternative before the summer heat settles over the Ribera.