HERITAGE WITHIN EVERYONE'S REACH. FROM ROMANESQUE TO BAROQUE IN THE AREA OF TAFALLA

20 September 2005

The Royal Palace of Tafalla
Dr. Emilio Quintanilla

Organised by the Chair de Patrimonio y Arte Navarro and Tafalla Town Council.

Nothing remains - only the site, the memory and some scattered remains - of what was once one of the most beautiful palaces of the monarchy of Navarre. In the 19th century, war destroyed one of the buildings where the refined art of the court of Charles III the Noble had been expressed with the greatest freedom and richness.

In this lecture we first attempted, as far as the written evidence allows, to reconstruct what the palace might have looked like. We then looked at the circumstances in which its destruction took place and the unsuccessful attempts to prevent it by the Commission of Historical and Artistic Monuments of Navarre, led by its board member Juan Iturralde y Suit and the Count of Guenduláin, and the participation of the Town Council of Tafalla in the attempts to save the palace complex. There was also a historiographical review of the different authors who have dealt with the topic and the fate of the few remains of the palace that have come down to us: one of the stone armchairs in the garden and a grille.