Soutomaior Castle (Galician: Castelo de Soutomaior, Spanish: Castillo de Soutomayor) is a medieval castle located in the municipality of the same name in Galicia, Spain. It is situated about 119 metres above sea level on the top of Mount Viso.
Built in the 12th century by Pedro Álvarez de Soutomaior it is one of the most important castles in Southern Galicia.[1]
Sotomayor Castle (in Galician castelo de Soutomaior) is a medieval castle from the 12th century, place of origin and center of power of one of the most significant lineages of medieval Galicia, the Sotomayor (Soutomaior). It is located 20 kilometers from Vigo and 15 from Pontevedra.
Since May 2018, the castle has housed a museum that collects chronological milestones and information about different historical moments of the place. The fortress was inhabited in the 15th century by the nobleman known as Pedro Madruga who improved its defensive aspects and introduced new features to adapt the fortification to the use of firearms. It recovered its splendor as a summer palace at the end of the 19th century with Antonio Aguilar y Correa, Marquis of la Vega de Armijo and Marquis of Mos, and his wife Zenobia Vinyals, who carried out neo-Gothic style transformations. At the beginning of the 20th century, her niece María Vinyals, a writer and feminist pioneer in Galicia, inherited the castle. In 1987, the last restoration of the castle was inaugurated, acquired by the Provincial Council of Pontevedra in 1982 and converted into a museum in May 2018. Since 2016 it has been the headquarters of the María Vinyals Equality School.
The 29-hectare estate includes a 15,700 m 2 botanical garden where you can find 175 different tree species, some of them more than eight hundred years old. Also notable is the collection of 300 camellia specimens of 22 different types. In 2012 it was declared a Garden of International Excellence by the International Camellia Society.
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