Torres de Serranos

Being turned into a prison is what saved these towers. When the rest of Valencia’s medieval walls came down in the 1860s, this gate survived largely because it still served a practical purpose — three centuries of holding noble prisoners had, unintentionally, kept it standing.

Europe’s largest Gothic city gate

Master stonemason Pere Balaguer began construction in April 1392, on the site of an earlier Islamic gate, and finished the twin-towered structure by March 1398 — genuinely fast work for a building now recognised as the largest Gothic city gate anywhere in Europe. Its towers are deliberately shaped for defence, rectangular on the city-facing side and pentagonal on the outer face, angled specifically to deflect artillery. For most of the medieval period it served as Valencia’s ceremonial northern entrance, the gate through which kings, ambassadors and royal processions formally entered the city.

A prison that outlived the walls around it

Everything changed in 1586, when a fire destroyed one of Valencia’s main prisons and the towers were hastily converted to hold noble and knightly prisoners instead — a use that continued for the next three hundred years, until the last inmates were transferred out in 1887. A small bronze bell on the gate’s southern face, originally installed to warn of sieges as early as 1363, was repurposed during this period to alert the city if a prisoner escaped. When Valencia tore down most of its remaining medieval walls in the mid-19th century, this gate’s continuing use as a working prison is widely credited as one of the key reasons it was spared — a building saved not by preservation instinct, but by simple ongoing usefulness.

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