August 26

Art, heritage and renaissance culture in Estella

Elba Ochoa
Ph.D. in art history

In our lecture held in Estella on August 26, 2025, we show a wide panorama of the strong transformations that the turn of the century brought about and the influence of Renaissance culture and art in that city. We focused mainly on the urban planning and the most unique architectural buildings of the city.

The 16th century in Navarre began with the conquest, the dynastic change and the reorganization of the institutions and defenses of the new kingdom added to Castile in the Cortes of Burgos in 1515. After a period of uncertainty due to the attempts of recovery of the kingdom by its legitimate monarchs, by the 30's of the century we can speak of a "pax navarra" that will be indispensable at the time that shrewd Navarrese merchants, such as the Eguía or San Cristóbal de Estella families, trade with Europe. This trade will not only be national with the attendance to the most renowned peninsular fairs but with European commercial centers that from the terrestrial routes by France or maritime through the ports of the Cantabrian and Basque coast like San Sebastian or Pasajes and with other French like San Juan de Luz or the Rochelle put them in contact with the center of distribution of the international and world-wide commerce at that time, Flanders. This rich trade based on the sale and distribution of local products such as aggregates, oil or wine was completed with wool, a market that mostly absorbed the production of the southern area of Navarre and nearby markets such as La Rioja or Soria. As is well known, the exchange was mainly for manufactured and luxury products.

This market, exploited by Navarrese merchants who formed trading companies for its purchase and distribution, was a fertile business, which made them rich until the 1560s when the wars of religion ravaged France and interrupted it. 

We begin our tour through the heritage of Estella with a vision of the defenses of the city that was modified with the arrival in 1523 of the emperor at its gates, specifically at what we know today as "Puerta de Castilla" and that we think was modified and decorated for such an exalted visit, on the occasion of the relief of Fuenterrabía that had been invaded by the French. 

The city was modified mainly by the opening and reconfiguration of new squares, which logically "made the city". Their function in a city as historically commercial as Estella is primordial, we are talking about the place de Santiago or place del Prado, the place de San Juan in front of the said parish, the place del Santo Sepulcro also in front of the said temple and the place de San Martín. This place in plenary session of the Executive Council heart of the old neighborhood of San Martin, in front of the Regiment of the city: House or San Martin, as cited in the documentary sources, is well documented, the land was purchased around 1510 and around 1531 already tried to bring water to erect the source  

place San Martin (1510-1530) and seat of the old Regiment of Estella (Baroque period). Photo Sergio Casi Larrión

However, the Regiment of Estella promoted, as was mandatory in that century, great cultural enterprises such as the construction of the General Hospital of the city under the patronage of Juan de Eguía, the continuation of the Study of Grammar, pensioning the teachers, as reflected in the Books of municipal conference proceedings , or reforming the very seat of the Town Hall, the House or Sea of San Martin, (current seat of the Tourist Office of the city and Interpretation Center of the City of Estella-Lizarra) under whose supervision was Diego de San Cristóbal and was carried out by the stonemason Juan de Aguirre.

After that, we continue with the reforms that were carried out in the main parishes of the city, all of them of great interest. The parish churches of Estella in most cases were erected in the 13th century, so by the 16th century they were either unfinished or pending repairs. This is the case of the main church of Estella, the parish of San Pedro de la Rúa, which in that century was falling down and the whole of it was bricked up and buried to avoid it, although these elements were not enough and in later centuries new projects were carried out to avoid this disaster. Although the most Renaissance of this church is the crypt of the Navarra family, Marshals of the Kingdom and Marquises of Cortes, brought back to light in the restoration of the building in the years 2019-2012 where the main members of the family were buried and that in its day had a fence delimiting the private space and a golden tumulus. The conserved thing at the present time sample a not very wide sepulchral camera closed with a beautiful stone lauda decorated with a cartouche of twisted leathers with a rampant lion on two legs and with fierce attitude that in marked foreshortening lodges the shield of the Navarre, in one of its variants. This burial has been dated in 1552. 

Lauda from the tomb of the Mariscals in San Pedro de la Rúa, 1552. Photo Sergio Casi Larrión

The parish church of San Miguel, in the neighborhood of the same name, in the 16th century had a wooden ceiling in its central nave and in 1539 Miguel de Eguía, the printer, as procurator of the same, arranged with the stonemason Juan de Aguirre to replace it with rejola or brick, but painting it as if it were stone, so that it would not show visual interruption with the rest of the medieval ensemble. At the present time this central nave sample starred vaults of great beauty with straight and curved curved terceletes, different according to the sections and whose keystones are decorated with busts and the capitals and corbels that support them have figurative reliefs of naked children, masks and heads of cherubs within the Renaissance style.

Finally, the parish church of San Juan Bautista culminated in the Renaissance with its change of the presbytery to a new polygonal one covered by a beautiful ribbed ceiling and housing in 1563 a beautiful Romanesque altarpiece, under the invocation of the Santos Juanes, contracted in 1563 by the carver Pierres Picart and with the partnership of Fray Juan de Beauves, master imaginer. Creating a beautiful sacred space to the new Renaissance taste that contrasts with the rest of the space very modified in later centuries.

Presbytery of the church of San Juan Bautista 1526. Photo Sergio Casi Larrión

Although the parish churches underwent serious modifications as we have seen, the architecture that was erected "ex nuovo" was civil or private. The great families of the city, most of whom were nobility, erected "main houses of the entailed estate" in the main arteries of the city, whether in the Rúa Mayor de los Zapateros or Rúa Mayor de San Miguel los Eguía or in the Rúa Mayor de San Pedro where the Camino de Santiago runs in the case of the San Cristóbal family. 

Main façade of the San Cristobal family house 1540-1550. Photo Sergio Casi Larrión

Both buildings, the house of the Eguía family in 1538 and the house of the San Cristóbal family in 1540-50, show a construction in the new Renaissance fashion, based on models common to the middle valley of the Ebro, built in brick on a stone plinth, noble floor and ending in rafe or wooden eaves. Inside, the main conference room and courtyard as an indispensable element of the family and spatial microcosm. All this without separating his earthly house from his heavenly one, that is to say, house and burial chapel, as two indissoluble elements of the noble mentality of the moment in imitation of the kings and courtiers. The Eguía family had a chapel in San Miguel under the dedication of Santa Agueda, which is conserved at the present time with the sepulchers in arch solio of the brothers Nicolás and Juan de Eguía with their respective wives, while the San Cristóbal were buried in their parish of San Pedro de la Rúa, but without confirming up to the moment neither archaeologically nor documentarily, nothing that indicates to us that it was outstanding or main. 

Finally, we close this lecture by talking about Miguel de Eguía and his impressions full of pure humanism, which had such an aesthetic influence on posterity.

In conclusion, we will say that the Renaissance, which is reflected in the heritage, culture, arts and printing, starts from the man who lived humanism with a total openness to the world around him and that was the success of so much visual and plastic richness that they bequeathed to us.