Alcazaba of Baza (Granada) Spain, Rediscovered

Abstract

The Andalusian medieval citadels are walled enclosures that, strategically placed on hills, still continue showing their defensive function inside the city and the surrounding territory. There are still good examples in the south of Spain, especially concentrated in the last territories of Al-Andalus. To the north of the old Nasrid kingdom of Granada, the city of Baza, with a brilliant Iberian and Roman past, also preserves some remains of its medieval past in its urban fabric. However, the Alcazaba of Baza, which was its main medieval architectural landmark, has suffered during the last century a lamentable process of abandonment and destruction that has almost made it disappear. Today its limits are unrecognizable and there are hardly visible parts of its walls or its towers. Anyone that visits it for the first time only recognizes a central empty space in the urban fabric. It has been mistreated by sporadic inappropriate uses, most of the time in disuse and converted into residual space of the city, a focus of marginality where it is not convenient to go. Despite its poor state of preservation, the fact of being an old military structure makes it a Historical Place of Interest (Bien de Interés Cultural–BIC-), the highest level of protection granted by the Law of Spanish Historical Heritage (1985). Since then, with greater or lesser fortune, the urban planning of Baza has recognized its values, although it has allowed lamentable interventions inside. With some more success, the current General Plan for Urban Development (2009) established, as a public free space, a scope of the Special Plan for the Interior Reform of the Alcazaba (PERICH-02) through which the protection, conservation and revaluation of the delimited space, as well as establishing determinations of use, qualification of the land and intervention criteria in its historical and archaeological heritage. The Special Plan of the Alcazaba of Baza is the result of an international contest carried out in 2007 and develops the winning proposal that dealt briefly with the values of the Alcazaba. Consequently, the regional administration competent in the protection of the historical heritage demanded that, for a correct drafting, an exhaustive study of the emergent and hidden remains of the medieval military structure should be carried out previously. From here it comes the commission that a research group of the University of Granada developed at the end of 2016 and which is the subject of this article: Combining digital technology through drones and field work, it has achieved surprising results that has been shown in several maps: an updated topographic of great precision and, what is even more interesting, a typological map at different levels that allows to establish accurate hypotheses for the future archaeological intervention and that conditions all the initial approach of the Special Plan that resulted from the contest of 2007.