Castillo de Colomares

A gynaecologist who had spent his working life in the United States came home to Benalmádena, decided Christopher Columbus lacked a proper monument, and built one himself. No blueprints, no funding, no architectural training — just Dr Esteban Martín Martín and two bricklayers, working for seven years. It is now the largest monument to Columbus anywhere on earth, and it contains the smallest church.

Three men, seven years, no plan

Martín trained at the University of Valladolid, practised for many years in the United States, and returned to Benalmádena in the 1970s. He laid the first stone in 1987 on land he owned called La Carraca, working with two master bricklayers from Mijas and Alhaurín el Grande, Juan Blanco and Domingo Núñez. There were no architectural drawings; the design developed as they built, out of his own reading in art and history. They used brick, stone, artificial stone, cement and wood. It was finished in 1994, and it consumed his entire personal fortune. He died in February 2001.

A building that argues with itself

Colomares is deliberately eclectic, assembling every architectural language present in Spain during Columbus’s lifetime — Romanesque, Gothic, Mudéjar, Byzantine — into one five-storey composition with towers rising around thirty-three metres, plus a Chinese pagoda for the East that Columbus thought he was sailing toward. The stonework is narrative rather than decorative: the three ships, stone maps, a bronze horse’s head for Martín Alonso Pinzón who recruited the crews at Palos de la Frontera, the royal shields of Isabel of Castile, and carved references to the three faiths of fifteenth-century Spain — Judaism, Christianity and Islam. A numbered chapter guide at the entrance turns sixteen sculptural sections into a readable account of the first voyage.

The smallest church in the world

Inside is a chapel dedicated to Saint Isabel of Hungary measuring 1.96 square metres — roughly the footprint of a double bed — and listed by Guinness as the world’s smallest church. There is barely room for a priest, which has not stopped weddings being held in it. Beside it stands an empty mausoleum, built in the hope that Columbus’s remains might one day rest there. They have not. Over the years the site has been put to some odd secondary uses, including as a falconry and a reptile centre, before settling into its role as a monument open to visitors.

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