By Mark A. Walsh

New York Times

When the residents of Villamartín heard that the landmark castle near their small town in southern Spain was to be restored, they probably envisaged a thoughtful restoration of the medieval stronghold to something approximating its former glory.

Instead, they have been left with something that many feel more closely resembles a multilevel parking garage.

The repair of Matrera Castle, perched on a ridge in the Andalusia region, has infuriated locals and provoked the ire of some conservators. Images of the castle before and after the restoration have recently fueled outrage and ridicule on social media.

“It’s a barbarity,” one town resident was quoted as saying by the Spanish news channel La Sexta. “I don’t like what they’ve done at all,” said another. “It looks like they’ve used builders instead of restorers,” a third said, using a mild expletive to assess the quality of the work.

Hispania Nostra, a preservationist group that advocates the protection of heritage sites, was similarly unimpressed.

The work is “truly lamentable” and “has very badly surprised locals and foreigners,” the group’s vice president, Carlos Morenés, said on its website, calling the project an example of the “massacre” of Spanish heritage.

The architect behind the restoration, Carlos Quevedo Rojas, acknowledged that his results were not to everyone’s taste. “I understand the criticism of local people used to seeing the tower look a certain way,” he said in a phone interview, “but the principle objective was to prevent the collapse of the structure.”

Quevedo Rojas said modern standards for restoring historic buildings discouraged efforts to make them look as they might have when first erected.

“You have to distinguish and maintain the historical value and architectural integrity,” he said. “You can’t make the structure have the same appearance as the original. You can’t falsify the appearance. It has to be clear which parts are new and which are old.”

According to Quevedo Rojas, plans to restore the castle, which is privately owned, were drawn up in 2011, but had to be altered when the north wall collapsed in 2013 because of floods in the area. “In this case, the first objective is to consolidate the structure so it doesn’t suffer further collapses,” he said.

The project, he said, cost hundreds of thousands of euros — he would not be more precise — and did not involve public funds. Town authorities and the culture and environment departments of the Andalusia regional government approved the project, he said.

Attempts to repair objects of historical significance have gone awry before in Spain. In 2012, a case of suspected vandalism in a church in the northeastern village of Borja turned out to be among the worst art restoration projects of all time: An 83-year-old widow and amateur painter admitted having tried to restore a nearly century-old fresco of Jesus crowned with thorns.

That story had a somewhat miraculous ending — the botched restoration was so appalling that the church has become a tourist attraction.

While the renovated Matrera Castle seems unlikely to enjoy the same fate, the makeover does have its defenders. José María Gutiérrez López, the director of Villamartín’s small history museum, said critics were simply ill-informed.

“I think the criticism comes from people without any knowledge of the criteria of modern restoration,” he said. “They wanted it to be restored to the same condition as it was before, but that’s not what happens.”

Gutiérrez López, who has written a book about the castle and the history of the surrounding area but was not involved in the repairs, expressed surprise at the negative attention it has received.

“When there was the collapse in 2013, we couldn’t even get 100 signatures together to restore the building,” he said. “Now there’s been this restoration, there’s been an outcry. It makes me very frustrated.”

“It looks fine to me,” he added. “I don’t think it’s out of place at all.”

© 2016 The New York Times Company