Peñíscola Castle

In 1417, the Catholic Church formally deposed and excommunicated its own pope. He refused to accept it — and spent the next twelve years running a one-man papacy from a fortress on the Spanish coast, still issuing papal bulls and appointing cardinals until the day he died.

The pope who wouldn’t quit

Pedro Martínez de Luna was elected Pope Benedict XIII in Avignon in 1394, during the decades-long chaos of the Western Schism, when rival popes in Rome and Avignon each claimed to be Christ’s true representative on Earth. In 1417, the Council of Constance finally tried to end the split by deposing every rival claimant and electing a single new pope, Martin V, to unite the Church. Every other claimant accepted the ruling. Benedict XIII did not. Convinced of his own legitimacy, he retreated to Peñíscola Castle — already his under the protection of the Crown of Aragon — and simply continued acting as pope, a one-man Vatican operating out of a fortress on a 64-metre limestone promontory jutting into the Mediterranean.

An assassination attempt hidden in dried fruit

Locally remembered as Papa Luna, Benedict XIII lived out his defiance for twelve years in genuinely austere conditions — visitors can still walk through the plain papal apartments where he worked. His stubbornness made him enemies well beyond theological objection: in 1418, a plot to poison him with arsenic hidden in dried citrus fruit, one of his few indulgences, very nearly succeeded. It didn’t. He continued issuing bulls and appointing cardinals from Peñíscola until his death in 1423, having never once acknowledged the authority that had stripped him of his title. Local legend holds that his ghost still walks the castle, repeating his declaration of legitimacy to this day.

A walled town built to match its castle

The castle doesn’t stand alone — it crowns a genuinely walled old town, its narrow whitewashed streets climbing the same promontory toward the fortress at the top. Locally nicknamed the “Gibraltar of Valencia” for its dramatic, rock-anchored profile jutting into the sea, Peñíscola pairs its papal history with long sandy beaches on either side of the isthmus connecting it to the mainland, making it one of the few Spanish coastal towns where a genuinely serious medieval history sits directly above an entirely modern beach holiday. The castle has been restored repeatedly over the centuries, most notably in 1960 ahead of major film production, and the town below has grown around tourism without losing the walled silhouette that made it a fortress in the first place.

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