Javier Castle

Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta, later Francis Xavier, was born in this castle in 1506 into a Navarrese noble family; he went on to co-found the Jesuits with Ignatius of Loyola and to travel as a missionary to India, Malacca and Japan, dying off the Chinese coast in 1552. The castle itself was already old, begun in the tenth century, and in 1516 Cardinal Cisneros ordered much of it demolished after the family supported the losing side in the Castilian annexation of Navarre. Jesuits restored it from 1892 in a style that added towers and battlements, so the present building mixes surviving medieval fabric with romantic reconstruction. It holds a chapel with a fifteenth-century walnut crucifix and a painted dance of death.

What you actually see

• The medieval keep - surviving fabric from the tenth-century castle.
• The 1892 restoration - Jesuit rebuilding that shaped the present outline.
• The dance of death - a fifteenth-century painted mural in the chapel.
• The smiling Christ - a walnut crucifix venerated in the castle chapel.

When to go

April to June and September to November; the Javierada, a mass pilgrimage on foot from Pamplona, takes place over two weekends in March and fills the site with tens of thousands. The castle closes on some winter days.

Honest expectations

Much of the castle is nineteenth-century reconstruction rather than medieval fabric. It is a devotional site as much as a monument. Javier is a very small village with limited services.

Nearby

Leyre monastery lies north; the Foz de Lumbier and Sanguesa are close.