Castle of la Mota de Benavente

The castle was built during the 12th-century resettlement effort promoted by Fernando II. In 1202, King Alfonso IX held Cortes at this castle, and in 1230 it was the site of the Concordat of Benavente, which sealed the permanent union of the kingdoms of León and Castile under Fernando III. The castle is documented in the hands of the Pimentel family since 1398, when Alfonso Pimentel received the town from King Henry III, who named him count of it. During the Pimentel lordship (14th-19th centuries), the castle served as the counts' residence and underwent several renovations; the 4th Count of Benavente, Rodrigo Alonso Pimentel, inherited the estate in 1459 and began its reconstruction.

In the early 19th century, French troops destroyed and burned it. Of the destroyed fortress, only the Torre del Caracol survived, upon which the Parador "Rey Fernando II de León" was inaugurated in the early 1970s.

The 1230 Concordat of Benavente, signed at this castle, ties the site directly to one of the foundational moments of medieval Spanish political history — the permanent union of León and Castile.

The survival of only the Torre del Caracol from the original fortress, following its destruction by French troops during the Peninsular War, gives the current Parador a genuinely fragmentary relationship to the historic castle it commemorates.

The castle's centuries-long documented ownership by the Pimentel family, from 1398 through the 19th century, gives it one of the longer single-family ownership records among Spain's castle-hotels.