Valladolid, the brief royal capital: Plaza Mayor to the Casa de Cervantes: a self-guided walk

By Alleytale

The brief royal capital: Philip III's court and Cervantes

At the urging of the Duke of Lerma, Philip III moved his court to Valladolid in 1601 and took it back to Madrid in 1606. The city that had already seen a king born swelled with the court, Cervantes was among those living here, and a cathedral planned for a capital was left unfinished.

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The stops

1. 1Plaza Mayor

   A fire that began on 21 September 1561 destroyed more than 400 houses, and the council asked Philip II for help the day after it ended. The royal architect Francisco de Salamanca designed the rectangular, fully arcaded square that replaced the old market, which the Spanish page calls the first regular plaza mayor in Spain; the squares of Madrid in 1617 and Salamanca in 1729 show a clear influence from it. A statue of Count Pedro Ansúrez, who took over the town in 1072, presides over it and dates from 1903.

   

2. 2San Benito el Real

   This church stands on the site of Valladolid's old royal alcázar. The Benedictines built it in stone between 1499 and 1515 as their main house in Castile, and Rodrigo Gil de Hontañón designed its gate-tower façade in 1569. After the confiscation of church property in 1835 the monastery became a fort and barracks and the church was deconsecrated, until it reopened in 1892.

   

3. 3Palacio de Fabio Nelli

   Fabio Nelli, a banker born in Valladolid whose father came from a banking family of Siena, began this palace in 1576 after returning to his home town following years of business elsewhere during the boom in trade with America. After a pause of five years, work resumed under Pedro de Mazuecos the Younger, who from 1595 gave the front its symmetrical, Italian-inspired design with two towers and a central entrance. The English page quotes an architect who calls it the best example of classicism in Valladolid's civil architecture, and today it is home to the Valladolid Museum.

   

4. 4Palacio Real de Valladolid

   Francisco de los Cobos, secretary of state to Charles V, built this palace to a project of 1524 beside the church of San Pablo. In 1601 the Duke of Lerma, favourite of Philip III, had the court moved to Valladolid, and the palace served as the royal residence until the court went back to Madrid in 1606. The future Philip IV was born here on 8 April 1605.

   

5. 5Iglesia de San Pablo

   The Dominican church of San Pablo has a façade that Simón de Colonia finished around 1500 in the Isabelline Gothic style. In 1601, when the capital moved to Valladolid, the Duke of Lerma became the church's patron: he paid to rework the main front, which gained its two flanking towers and many Gothic sculptures, and he gave the convent artworks including Fra Angelico's Annunciation, now in the Prado. Philip II and Philip IV were both baptised here.

   

6. 6Colegio de San Gregorio

   Alonso de Burgos, a Dominican friar who was confessor to the Catholic Monarchs, founded this college, Pope Innocent VIII confirmed it in 1487, and its richly carved façade was finished in the 1490s. It is one of the best examples of the Isabelline style. In 1550 and 1551 the college hosted the Valladolid debate, in which Bartolomé de las Casas defended the rights of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, and it now houses the National Museum of Sculpture.

   

7. 7Palacio de Pimentel

   Philip II was born in this palace in 1527, when the royal family was lodging here for the Cortes held that April and the building belonged to Bernardino Pimentel. Its best-known feature is the Plateresque corner window of the early 16th century, with grotesque decoration modelled on the paintings of Rome's Domus Aurea. The story goes that the newborn was carried out through a window with a chain hanging from it to be baptised at San Pablo, but the Spanish page says this distorts the facts: a raised passage was built between the palace and the church for the baptism, and one of the windows served as the exit.

   

8. 8Santa María la Antigua

   Tradition credits Count Pedro Ansúrez with founding this church in the late 11th century, though the first document that mentions it dates from 1177. Its Romanesque tower and north gallery date from the late 12th or early 13th century. The tower, one of the symbols of Valladolid, has four floors and a pyramidal top. Remains of Roman baths have been found beneath the building, and the high altarpiece Juan de Juni made for it between 1550 and 1562 now stands in the cathedral.

   

9. 9Estatua de Cervantes

   This statue was unveiled on 29 September 1877 in the Campillo del Rastro, a square facing the house where Cervantes had lived from 1605. Nicolás Fernández de la Oliva modelled the cast figure, and Pablo Santos de Berasategui made four reliefs of scenes from Don Quixote for its pedestal. When the area around the house was redeveloped in 1899 the statue moved to the University square, where it stands, and the reliefs went to the courtyard of the house museum.

   

10. 10Iglesia de las Angustias

    This church belongs to a penitential brotherhood whose members were mostly rich merchants. A merchant couple, Martín Sánchez de Aranzamendi and Luisa de Rivera, gave 60,000 ducats for it, and Juan de Nates designed a façade inspired by the cathedral and Italian models, with echoes of Bramante, using the foremost craftsmen of what was then the city of the Court. The building was finished in 1604, the façade sculptures by Francisco de Rincón were due in September 1606, and inside is Juan de Juni's image of Our Lady of Anguish, described as one of his best-known works.

    

11. 11Catedral de Valladolid

    Juan de Herrera drew up the main layout of a cathedral that would have been the largest in Europe, planned for the capital city of Spain. Only 40 to 45 percent of it was built, because money ran short after the court moved to Madrid and the foundations proved difficult and costly. Only one tower stands, and the upper part of the façade is Alberto Churriguera's work of the 18th century, in imitation of the church of El Escorial. Inside is the altarpiece by Juan de Juni that came from Santa María la Antigua.

    

12. 12Plaza de la Fuente Dorada

    The layout of this square goes back to the 13th century, when the market square, now the Plaza Mayor, was also planned in the area. In 1603, while the court was in town, it was known as the Gallinería Vieja, because dressed poultry was sold here. It took its present name from a gilded bronze fountain by Diego de Praves, installed in 1616, that carried fresh water from the Argales supply; the fountain at the centre today, with figures of the old trades alternating with the four seasons, dates from the remodelling of 1997.

    

13. 13Iglesia de Santiago Apóstol

    This church started as a small hermitage in the early 12th century and became a parish church around 1400. As trade around the nearby Plaza Mayor swelled the parish, the merchant and banker Luis de la Serna paid to rebuild it in the late 15th century, in return for the main chapel as his family's burial place, and hired Juan de Arandia, who had directed San Benito el Real since 1499. The chancel was finished in 1500, work on the tower began four years later, and it got its octagonal top in 1610, and when part of the nave collapsed early in the 17th century Francisco de Praves redesigned it from 1615.

    

14. 14Casa Mantilla

    This apartment block, built in 1891 and 1892, stands on the site of the Hospital de la Resurrección, which cared for the poor and sick for more than three centuries and which Cervantes made the setting of his story The Dialogue of the Dogs, although the Spanish page on the hospital says the dogs' real owner, Mahudes, begged for the Desamparados hospital instead. A plaque on the corner of Miguel Íscar and Acera de Recoletos recalls the hospital, which was demolished around 1890. The main flat got Valladolid's first lift in 1892, a hydraulic one, and a piece of the hospital's 16th-century doorway, with the figure of the risen Christ, survives in the garden of the Casa de Cervantes.

    

15. 15Casa de Cervantes

    Cervantes was living here in 1605, around the time the first part of Don Quixote was published. The house is one of a row of new houses begun in 1602 when the arrival of the court swelled the city, and his family lived in only part of one of them, above a tavern, though the museum now joins three. On the night of 27 June 1605 a knight, Gaspar de Ezpeleta, was wounded in a brawl nearby and died two days later; Cervantes and his household were held and questioned, then freed after a few days, and the record of that inquiry is how the house was identified.

    

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