The Alcázar is a fortification on rocks, located in the highest part of the city of Toledo. Its name is due to the Arabs, who called it “Al Qasar”, which means “fortress”.
The investigations carried out have attested to the existence, at the beginning of our era (Roman times), of a walled enclosure that started from a defensive construction, located in the highest area of Toledo and continued in a straight line towards Zocodover and the Miradero, to join him again through the Alcántara Bridge.
During the Visigothic period, King Leovigildo (573-586 AD) established Toledo as his capital and from then on the surroundings of the Alcázar were used as “royal residences”.
In Muslim times it became an Arab fortress (alcazaba), residence of the qadi, ordered to be built by Abderramán III in 932 AD.
In 1085 Alfonso VI reconquered the city of Toledo by ordering the construction of a new Alcázar on the existing one. Alfonso X the Wise also undertook improvement works in the building. During the fourteenth century it served as a lodging for Dª. María de Padilla and the Toledo knights faithful to King D. Pedro, in his fight against D. Enrique de Trastámara.
When Carlos I returned to Spain from Germany, the building was modified again in 1535 under his mandate, entrusting the works to the architects Alonso de Covarrubias, Francisco de Villalpando and Juan de Herrera. Thus, with this remodeling, the life of a defensive building ended definitively to become another (as we see it today), made for the residence of kings, the seat of a national government, for the axis of an empire, and above all to show the power incontestable royal of the Habsburgs.
During the Spanish Civil War (1936) it was used by Colonel José Moscardó as a defensive point.
Its current appearance is due to a large Renaissance palace, with a rectangular floor plan of 60 meters. on the side, flanked at the corners by towers with square spires measuring 59 meters. approximately tall that protrude from the fronts and exceed them in height; all of it is carved in stone, except for the panels on the south façade, which are made of brick.
Inside it has a central patio with galleries with columns with Corinthian capitals, forming two floors, which rest on semicircular arches.
Currently the Alcázar building is the headquarters of the Military Government of Toledo, housing a section of the Army Museum and on its upper floor the Regional Library of Castilla-La Mancha.
