March 25, 2009

Global Seminars & Invited Speaker Series

STATELY HOMES AND PALACES OF NAVARRA

The Episcopal palace and the renovation of Pamplona in the 18th century

Ms. Pilar Andueza Unanua
University of Navarra

During the first half of the 18th century, Pamplona underwent a process of urban and monumental renovation such as the city had never known before, which definitively configured it, endowing its historic quarter with its most outstanding stately buildings and its most characteristic urban spaces. This process, developed under the baroque idea of urban beautification, with connotations of luxury and splendor, was completed in the second half of that century with the modernization of urban infrastructures. These public works, executed under enlightened postulates, took the form, among other actions, of street drainage, water supply, installation of fountains and new ordinances for cleanliness and buildings. 

This lively process of transformation had its logical repercussion on religious architecture, but it had a special impact on civil architecture, both in its public and private aspects, all of which embellished and monumentalized the capital of the kingdom, from agreement with the new mentalities of the social and economic elites of the city, who longed to give it a rich and sumptuous appearance as befitted the capital of a kingdom.

Thus a group of noble families, linked to the emigration to the Indies and to the Villa y Corte, as well as a large group of businessmen and merchants, decided at this time to build their family houses as an exponent of the economic and social power achieved. Among them are the Echeverz, Marquises of San Miguel de Aguayo, the Armendariz, Marquises of Castelfuerte, the Eslava, Marquises of Real Defensa, the Mutiloa, the Guendica, the Goyeneche, the Navarro Tafalla or the Urtasun.
 

House of the Echeverz family, Marquises of San Miguel de Aguayo
 

But also the authorities, both civil and ecclesiastical, participated in the constructive fervor of that time and erected new representative buildings. Thus, a new City Hall was built in 1753, the buildings that housed the Royal Courts were thoroughly renovated, and an episcopal palace was erected. The new bishop's residency program was erected in 1734 on the initiative of the then prelate Don Melchor Ángel Gutiérrez Vallejo. Although his death temporarily paralyzed the works, they were completed with the arrival of Don Francisco Ignacio Añoa y Busto, who took over the building in 1740.

Navarro's House