Monument to Francisco Navarro Villoslada

• Authors: Lorenzo Coullaut Valera and Pedro Muguruza.

• Materials and technique: Carved stone.

• Measurements: Conjunto: 400 cm; García Ximénez: 212 cm; Amaya: 204 cm.

• Location: Roundabout in front of the Hotel de los Tres Reyes.

• Date of installation: 26 September 1918 (inauguration).

In 1918, coinciding with the First Centenary of the birth of Francisco Navarro Villoslada (Viana, 1818-1895), the Provincial Council of Navarre and Pamplona City Council decided to honour the report of the Navarrese writer, journalist and historian by erecting a monument in his honour, for which a competition for projects was organised. The winner was the proposal signed by the Basque architect Pedro Muguruza and the Sevillian sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera.

The monument, raised on a three-tiered pedestal, is composed of a sober architectural structure, to which is added a group of three sculptures. On either side, with their outstretched arms surrounding the coat of arms of Navarre, are the figures of García Jiménez and his wife Amaya, the protagonists of Amaya or the Basques in the 8th century, Navarro Villoslada's most successful historical novel. The bust of the writer, with realist features, crowns the ensemble.

Lorenzo Coullaut Valera was one of the first artists to make an effort to "modernise" the commemorative monument by means of a process of "de-monumentalisation" in which the figures that originally seemed subsidiary to the main one, the object of the commemoration, took on greater formal importance, to the point of becoming the most significant part of the whole. resource This can be seen in the monument to Navarro Villoslada, where the bust of the Navarrese writer is, in reality, a minor part of the ensemble, and cedes its prominence to the figures of Amaya and García Jiménez arranged on either side and treated with descriptive aesthetics.