Spaniola Castle (Ruin) (Pontresina)

The Spaniola castle tower is located above Pontresina in the Engadin in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. The name "Spaniola Tower" is of more recent date; the origin of the name is unclear. Nicolin Sererhard mentions around 1740 that the tower bears the name of the village.

The ruin of the mighty, almost regularly pentagonal tower is well preserved. Traces of a curtain wall, which surrounded the tower at a distance of approx. 5 m, are barely discernible in the terrain. The tower originally had four floors; on the 2nd floor, on the valley side to the southwest, there was a round-arched high entrance. The entrance was via a covered wooden gallery, whose beam holes and stone corbels are still preserved. On the 2nd and 3rd floors there are narrow loopholes, on the 4th a square window. On the northeast side there was a latrine bay with a drainage channel at the northern base of the wall. The corbel stones are also still visible. A pyramid roof, adapted to the floor plan, is to be assumed as the top.

The tower was built around 1200, but no written documents are available.

Presumably, the castle was the seat of the Lords of Pontresina, who are documented from 1244 to 1307. As the most important family in the Upper Engadin, they got into a dispute with the Bishop of Chur in 1244, in which they were denied the chancellorship. In the same year, the tower was devastated, but restored in 1261. However, the Lords of Pontresina seem to have asserted themselves, because in 1294 they pledged the chancellorship, a bishop's fief, to Andreas Planta. The family probably died out with Symon von Pontresina, whose fief, the tithe of Pontresina and Celerina, was received by the Murell family.

In the course of the 15th century, the tower was abandoned; Ulrich Campell mentions it as a ruin around 1550. In 1934 and 1994, stabilization work was carried out.