October 20, 2009

Conference

The Palace of the Marquises of San Miguel de Aguayo:
Image and report of a Navarrese lineage

Ms. Pilar Andueza Unanua.
Chair of Navarrese Heritage and Art

The palace that stands at number 65 of Calle Mayor in Pamplona is linked to the Echeverz family, a family of Navarrese noblemen who had a house in Berrioplano, from where they moved to Asiáin. Agustín de Echeverz y Subiza was born there in 1646. In spite of his condition of first-born son, he traveled to the Indies in 1662, where he rendered certain military services in the area of Nuevo León. His great work in those lands was his marriage to a rich Creole, Francisca Valdés Alceaga, great-granddaughter of a Basque conquistador, Francisco de Urdiñola, who was governor and captain general of Nueva Vizcaya, and possessed an extensive patrimony formed by haciendas, mines, factories and cattle that, transmitted through the female line, reached Francisca.

In 1681 the new marriage with the only daughter that would be born of this union, Ignacia Javiera, returned to Spain. Agustín from then on moved all the pieces to place himself in the social summit of the kingdom, so that in 1682 he obtained the habit of the order of Santiago and the degree scroll of marquis of San Miguel de Aguayo. A year later he returned to America, where he occupied the position of governor and captain general of the Kingdom of Leon. On his return to Navarre around 1688, he continued to enrich his cursus honorum as mayor of Pamplona, member of the Diputación or alguacil mayor of the kingdom. But his main work was the construction in 1698 of a great residency program in Pamplona, as an image and report of his lineage. Agustín died in 1699 and his wife, following his last wishes, in 1704, founded an entailed estate at the head of which she placed the new construction. Both the bond and the free property of the marquises passed to his daughter Ignacia Javiera. It was she who with her third husband, José de Azlor Virto de Vera, contracted in 1709 the execution of a new façade for the palace in Pamplona, which they commissioned to the stonemason Pedro de Arriarán and the sculptor Domingo de Gaztelu, who developed an iconographic program, based on the emblematic, extolling the Echeverz family through their military activity as good, just and virtuous rulers. However, before the frontispiece was finished, the marquises left for the Indies, from where they never returned. In 1802 one of their grandsons, Pedro Ignacio Valdivieso y Echeverz, from Mexico, sold the building to José de Ezpeleta y Galdeano, a Navarrese nobleman of noble ancestry who became viceroy of the New Kingdom of Granada and Navarre. The building was passed on to his successive heirs until it came to María Ezpeleta, Marquise of Amparo through her marriage to her cousin Carlos Mencos. In 1918, already widowed, the lady sold the building to the Teresian Sisters. Recently the Government of Navarre acquired the building where the Conservatory of Music was installed.
 

Main house of the Marquises of San Miguel de Aguayo. Pamplona. XVIII Century

Main house of the Marquises of San Miguel de Aguayo. Pamplona. XVIII century. Detail

Main house of the Marquises of San Miguel de Aguayo. Pamplona. XVIII century. Detail