On the night of 6 July 1570, a troop of 600 men led by El Yebali and Lorenzo Alfaqui set out disguised as Castilians with the intention of assaulting this town of only eighty inhabitants. They began the assault in squadrons of eight ranks with six horses on their flanks, giving the impression that they had come to perform some kind of service for the King.
There were only seven men left in the village in a position to defend themselves. The women, disguised as men to deceive the assailants, took up arms, went up to the bell tower to ring out and to the castle to defend it. Three assaults were made on the fortification and three were repulsed.
The attempt cost the Moors seventeen dead and sixty wounded. María Sagredo, seeing her father wounded, made her way through the horde, climbed to the top of a tower which she defended bravely and killed a Moor and wounded others with arrows, laying them at the foot of the tower she was defending. The Moors, seeing the resistance and tenacity of those people who were prepared to die rather than surrender, decided to retreat, setting fire to thirty houses, arresting four young women and stealing 3000 head of cattle.
“Here it occurs to me as a good example to mention the courage of a maiden called María Sagredo, who, seeing her father Martín Domínguez fall from a shotgun hit by a Moor, came to him and took a capotillo that he was wearing, and put a crossbow on his head, and with the crossbow in his hands and the quiver by his side he climbed the wall, and fighting as a valiant man could do, he defended a gate, and killed a Moor, and wounded many others with an arrow, and did so much that day, that he deserved that the council of his majesty granted him some estates of Moors in Tolox for his marriage”.
Thus narrated Luis del Mármol Carvajal at the end of the 16th century the story of María Sagredo, a singular heroine who defended Alozaina from an attempted assault during the Moorish rebellion in 1570, when there were only women, children and old people in the village. But the legend goes further and claims that this brave woman noticed some beehives, which she immediately threw away. The swarms attacked the besiegers of the village with fury and they had to retreat with the cry of “cursed be the flies of your land”.
The keep you are looking at is the main remains of the old castle; it juts out from the walls of the enclosure and is integrated into the group of dwellings in the area. It has a truncated cone shape and is made up of large blocks of stone carved on the outside.
Visiting hours: all year round