65% of the buildings with heritage value in Pamplona are located in the historic center, where one fifth of the city's cultural facilities are also located. This is reflected in the thesis of researcher Angel Javier Alcalde, defended at the department of Geography and Spatial Planning of the University of Navarra.

For the analysis of the heritage value, Angel Javier Alcalde focuses his research on the location of buildings and other elements of artistic value, such as fountains, crosses and statues, or the city walls themselves, in order to analyze the quality they confer to the public space.

The result indicates that the downtown area of the historic center (Zapatería, Pozo Blanco, Mercaderes and other streets) is the area with the highest concentration of protected buildings. It also concludes that the group of the place de San José and Salsipuedes street, together with the space formed by the streets Pozoblanco, Zapatería, and Nueva and the place del committee are the places with the highest density of facades with heritage value. It also deduces that open spaces such as the Huertas de Santo Domingo or the place de Recoletas have excellent qualities of heritage visibility from the public space, as is also the case with the place de San José and the Rincón de la Aduana.

62% for civilian use and 38% for religious use

The thesis , directed by University of Navarra professor Juan José Pons, points out that of the 179 cultural facilities spread throughout the capital (libraries, archives, museums, art spaces teaching and others), 31 are located in the historic center, according to the Ministry of Culture. However, "the current existence of only 26 of them has been verified, to which must be added the multipurpose center of the Palacio del Condestable (2008), which has recently become the Civivox of the old town," says the author.

As for the character of the main artistic and heritage buildings, "they were originally mostly civilian buildings (55% of the total), although this percentage currently reaches 62%, with the remaining 38% of buildings dedicated to religious use," says Ángel Javier Alcalde. Of the 11 listed buildings that have changed their use, 3 were religious and 8 were civilian, all of them acquiring new functions related to cultural use.

Precisely, this tendency to take advantage of buildings of heritage value for cultural purposes is one of the conclusions most emphasized by researcher: "One third of the main protected buildings in the old town currently house facilities with artistic-cultural uses; or, stated from another point of view, only 7 of the 27 spaces with artistic-cultural functions are not located in buildings with artistic value. In this way, it can be seen that the heritage value of buildings increasingly coincides with their cultural use", he concludes.