Staying at a medieval castle in Alarcon, Spain

After spending 48 hours exploring Madrid and walking almost 20 miles, we picked up our rental car and drove 2 hours southwest to Alarcon. Alarcon is a tiny town on a hill, surrounded by a river. The entire town sits inside mediaval walls and there’s a castle, which you can actually stay at!

The government of Spain owns the buildings and runs them as hotels to help pay for the upkeep and maintenance of the historic buildings. There are over 80 sites all across Spain and the program is called Paradores.

The check in process is exactly the same as a regular hotel and our room was in the tower of the castle, where each floor is a single room so it was nice and spacious! After checking in we headed up to the ramparts to have a look around. This is only for guests staying the night as you need to get the key from reception but it’s definitely worth it if you’re staying as the view from up there is beautiful.

We went for a stroll around the town before heading back to the castle for dinner in the main hall. It was off season when we went so there was only us and one other couple for dinner and it felt like we were eating in the hall at Hogwarts with the beautiful arched ceilings and stone walls. The food was really good too and very reasonably priced, we had the daily special menu which was 3 courses for 40 euro each.

The next morning we headed back to the main hall for breakfast which is included in the stay, they bring you a plate with fruit and cheese and some meats and then you can order things like pancakes, waffles and eggs if you’d like. After filling up on food we headed into a local town about 10 miles away to go to the grocery store. We grabbed some baguettes and cheese and meat to have a picnic on our hike which we went out on later in the day.

The hike we did took us all around the outside of the town and was about 8km/5miles and took us 2.5 hours to complete. It was relatively easy except we actually did it backwards so what should’ve been a big descent at the end ended up being a big ascent for us at the beginning. Oops!

The next morning we had breakfast in the hall again and then headed into town to see one of the churches which is a UNESCO site for the mural inside it. It cost a few euro each to see it and it was…..interesting. Not really to either of our tastes but we can say we’ve seen it at least.

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