These streets are built with large brick houses and small adobe houses. Pointed cobbles form the pavement, and leave a dirty open sewer in the middle.
The large houses have two granite columns on their facades, on either side of the door, and these columns as well as the stones of the threshold take on a violet tinge from the lees of wine the inhabitants have the custom of putting on the sidewalks to dry.
Many of the big houses in Castro boast a large ‘scutcheon over the door, little crazy towers with iron weather-cocks on the roof; and some of them a huge stork’s nest.
The streets remote from the centre of town have no paving, and their houses are low, built of adobe, and continued by yards, over whose mud-walls appear the branches of fig-trees.
These houses lean forward or backward, and they have worn-out balconies, staircases which hold up through some prodigy of stability, and old grills, crowned with a cross and embellished with big flowers of wrought iron.
The two principal monuments of Castro Duro are the Great Church and the palace.
The Great Church is Romanesque, of a colour between yellow and brown, gilded by the sun. It stands high, at one extremity of the hill, like a sentinel watching the valley. The solid old fabric has rows of crenels under the roof, which shows its warlike character.
The principal dome and the smaller ones are ribbed, like almost all the Romanesque churches of Spain.
The round apse exhibits ornamental half columns, divers rosettes, and a number of raised figures, and masonic symbols. In the interior of the church the most notable thing to be seen is the Renaissance altar-piece and a Romanesque arch that gives entrance to the baptistery.
The second archeological monument of the town is the ancient palace of the Dukes of Castro Duro.