Castillo de Aulencia and the Childhood Adventures It Built
Some places do more than mark a map. They raise you.
For me, that place was the Castillo de Aulencia, the ruined 15th-century mudéjar castle near Madrid that stood above my childhood like a quiet elder. It did not speak, but it taught me. It did not move, but it shaped the direction of my days. It did not belong to me, of course, but as a child I felt it had been placed there for us, for our bikes, our games, our whispered missions, our afternoons with dusty shoes and no real plan.
We called it simply el castillo.
Not “the castle near the river.” Not “the old ruin outside town.” Just el castillo, as if there were no other castle in the world that mattered.
I grew up with it in the corner of my eye. It watched from the hill, broken and stubborn, with its towers cut open to the sky. Its stones carried that reddish, earthy tone that belongs to old Castilian buildings, part fortress, part wound, part memory. The castle was not polished. It was not restored into something safe and decorative. It was rough, incomplete, and all the more powerful for it.
That is my claim, and I stand by it: a ruin can build a child better than many monuments can.
The castle made ordinary afternoons feel legendary
Childhood has a way of turning small distances into epic journeys.
The ride to el castillo was not far, at least not in adult terms. But on a bike, with the sun warming the back of your neck and the road dust sticking to your legs, it felt like crossing into another province of the imagination.
I remember the sound of tires over gravel. The little metallic rattle of the bike chain. The smell of dry grass and hot earth. The way the light changed as the afternoon stretched out over the fields near Madrid. We did not need expensive toys. We had a ruin on the horizon, and that was enough.
There were days when I rode past it alone, pretending I was carrying an urgent message between kingdoms. Other days, friends came along, and the ride became a campaign. We were knights, spies, explorers, fugitives, sometimes all in the same hour.
“¡Vamos, rápido!” someone would shout, though nothing was chasing us except time and the thought of dinner at home.
The castle gave the game a center. Without it, we were only kids on bikes. With it, we had a destination. We had a fortress. We had a reason to pedal harder.
I can still see myself looking up at those walls and feeling that strange mix of fear and belonging. The castle was damaged, yes, but it was not weak. It had survived weather, abandonment, and silence. To a child, that kind of survival feels almost alive.
Ruins leave room for a child to enter
A perfect castle tells you what to admire.
A ruined castle asks you what you can imagine.
That difference matters.
The Castillo de Aulencia never handed me a finished story. It gave me fragments. A wall. A tower. A shadow. A broken outline against the sky. The rest was mine to invent.
I think this is why it mattered so much. A complete place can impress you, but an incomplete place invites you in. It leaves gaps wide enough for a child to walk through.
I invented secret rooms where there were none. I imagined hidden staircases under the earth. I decided certain stones were signs left by people who had disappeared centuries ago. I gave names to enemies I never saw and kingdoms that never existed. I made the castle larger than it was, because childhood is generous that way.
The mudéjar character of the place also mattered, even if I did not have the words for it then. I did not know enough to describe the layers of history in its materials or style. I only knew it felt different from the newer houses, roads, and fences around us.
It carried Spain in a deeper register. Not the Spain of postcards or ceremonies, but the Spain of dust, brick, weather, and old mixtures. A place where many hands and traditions had left their mark.
As a boy, I did not think, “This is architectural heritage.”
I thought, “This is where the adventure begins.”
Growing up in its shadow gave me a sense of scale
Children need scale. They need something larger than themselves that does not immediately explain itself.
The castle gave me that.
It reminded me, long before I could say it clearly, that my life began in the middle of other stories. People had built before me. People had fought, farmed, crossed rivers, prayed, feared, loved, and disappeared. The world was not waiting for me to arrive. I had arrived inside it.
That lesson can sound heavy, but it did not feel heavy then. It felt exciting.
Riding past the castle, I sensed that the present was thin. Behind every ordinary afternoon, there was another layer. Behind the road, the field. Behind the field, the hill. Behind the hill, the ruin. Behind the ruin, centuries.
That awareness formed part of me.
Maybe that is why I have always been drawn to places with texture. Places that do not erase their scars. Places that still show the marks of use, age, repair, and loss. Clean surfaces can be beautiful, but I trust a worn stone more.
The castle taught me that broken things can still hold authority.
It taught me that a place does not need to be useful in a modern sense to be necessary. Nobody needed that fortress for defense anymore. Nobody was watching for armies from those towers. Yet the castle kept doing work. It worked on the imagination. It worked on memory. It worked on me.
The bike rides were my first lessons in freedom
A bike is often a child’s first proof that the world can open.
Before cars, passports, deadlines, and adult maps, there is the bike. You push off, wobble, find balance, and suddenly the neighborhood expands. Streets connect. Fields become reachable. The horizon becomes a dare.
My bike rides past el castillo felt like that. They were not organized activities. They were not scheduled “outdoor time.” They were freedom in its simplest form.
Pedal. Sweat. Stop. Look. Continue.
Sometimes I would slow down near the castle just to stare. Other times I would race past it as if speed itself could impress the stones. I liked to imagine the castle recognized me.
“Ahí va Franco,” it might have thought. There goes Franco again.
That sounds sentimental, I know. But children often build relationships with places before they understand relationships with history. A tree, a corner, a field, a ruin. These become witnesses. They hold versions of us that no photograph can fully catch.
The castle saw me when I was still becoming myself.
It saw the boy who believed a stick could be a sword. The boy who came home covered in dust. The boy who did not yet understand that one day he would leave, and that leaving would make the place even more important.
Memory does not preserve places cleanly
When I think of Castillo de Aulencia now, I do not see it as a historian would.
I see it through heat, motion, and childhood exaggeration.
Memory edits. It enlarges what mattered and blurs what did not. I cannot promise that every imagined battle happened on the exact path I remember. I cannot swear that every ride took place under the golden light my mind now gives it. Maybe some days were gray. Maybe some adventures were shorter than they feel.
But emotional truth has its own accuracy.
The castle was there. I was there. The feeling was real.
That is enough.
As adults, we often become suspicious of nostalgia. We worry it softens the past too much. We fear it turns real places into private myths. That is a fair concern. A castle is not only my memory. It belongs to the land, to history, to everyone who sees it and wonders.
Still, a place can be many things at once.
The Castillo de Aulencia can be a 15th-century mudéjar fortress near Madrid. It can be an architectural remnant. It can be a local landmark. It can be a fragile ruin that deserves care. And it can also be the place where a boy learned to turn the ordinary into a story.
Those meanings do not compete. They strengthen each other.
The counterargument is that people raise us, not places
I know the practical answer.
Parents raise children. Families raise children. Teachers, neighbors, friends, and communities shape who we become. Stones do not pack your lunch. Towers do not teach you table manners. A ruined wall does not tell you to come home before dark.
That is true.
But it is incomplete.
We are not raised by people alone. We are raised by rooms, streets, weather, smells, distances, and repeated views. We are raised by the walk to school, the sound of a gate closing, the corner where we waited for friends, the field where we got lost, the hill that made our legs burn.
Place enters the body quietly.
It teaches without lectures. It gives us metaphors before we know what metaphors are. A river teaches movement. A mountain teaches patience. A narrow street teaches attention. A ruin teaches endurance.
El castillo taught me how to imagine beyond what was visible.
It taught me that history is not locked in books. It stands in the open air, collecting sun and rain. It taught me that beauty can be severe, that silence can be full, and that a broken structure can still shelter a child’s inner life.
That is a kind of parenting.
Not the whole of it, of course. But a real part.
The stones are still under my feet
I no longer ride those childhood routes in the same way. Time changes the rider. It changes the roads. It changes the size of everything.
What once felt enormous may now look modest. What once felt far may now seem close. But the strange thing is this: the emotional distance does not shrink.
If anything, it grows.
The older I get, the more I understand what the castle gave me. It gave me a sense of origin that was not abstract. It was made of earth and stone. It had weight. It had color. It had a silhouette I could recognize from far away.
When I think about my life today, my work, my way of seeing, my affection for memory and place, I find those stones underneath it all. Not literally, but foundationally. They are part of the ground I stand on.
The castle did not ask to be meaningful. It simply remained.
Maybe that is what the best places do. They stay near us long enough for us to grow around them. They let us return in memory. They accept our inventions, our departures, and our gratitude.
Some places nurture us like parents. They do it quietly, without praise, without explanation. They stand in the background while we become ourselves.
For me, Castillo de Aulencia was one of those places.
Its stones are not only part of a ruin near Madrid. They are part of the foundation of my life. And somewhere inside me, the boy on the bike is still passing below those towers, still pedaling hard, still shouting into the warm air, “¡Vamos!”
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