The palace, a great structure of stone and now blackened brick, rises at the side of the town-hall, and has, like it, an arcade on the Square. In the central balcony there are monumental columns, and on top of them two giants of corroded stone, with large clubs, who appear to guard the ‘scutcheon; one end of the building is made longer by a square tower.
The palace wears the noble air given to old edifices by the large spread of wall containing windows very far apart, very small, and very much ornamented.
From the inscriptions on its various escutcheons one can gather that it was erected by the Duke of Castro Duro and his wife, Doña Guiomar.
In the rear of the palace, like a high belvedere built on the rampart, there appears a gallery formed of ten round arches, supported on slender pilasters. Below the gallery are the remains of a garden, with ramps and terraces and a few old statues. The river comes almost to the foot of the gardens.
Today the palace belongs to Don Calixto García Guerrero, Count de la Sauceda.
Don Calixto and his family have no necessity for the whole of this big palace to live in, and have been content to renovate the part fronting on the Calle Mayor. They have had new belvederes built in, and have given over the apartments looking on the Square and the Calle del Cristo to the Courts and the school.
Another great building, which astonishes every one that stops over at Castro Duro, by its size, is the Convent of la Merced. It has been half destroyed by a fire. In the groins there remain some large Renaissance brackets, and in one wing of the edifice, inhabited by the nuns, there are windows with jalousies and a rather lofty tower terminating in a weather-cock and a cross.
LIFE AT CASTRO
Castro Duro is principally a town of farmers and carriers. Its municipal limits are very extensive; the plain surrounding it is fertile enough. In winter there are many foggy days, and then the flat land looks like a sea, in which hillocks and groves float like islands. Wine and cultivated fruits constitute the principal riches of Castro. The wine is sharp, badly made; there is one thick dark variety which always tastes of tar, and one light variety which they reinforce with alcohol and which they call aloque.
Autumn is the period of greatest animation in the town; the harvest gets stowed away, the vintage made, the sweet almonds are gathered and shelled in the porticoes.