Tafalla

In the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of providing the city of Tafalla with a new town hall and various municipal buildings was associated with the execution of an ambitious urban planning project to beautify the city, which would include the creation of a public place for the weekly market and the construction of private homes. The ruined royal palace, whose main courtyard would be converted into an open public space, was quickly used to develop this plan, thus creating a regularized and unitary urban complex, under a rationalized conception. Following nearby models such as the new squares of Vitoria or San Sebastián, the approach responded to the nineteenth-century bourgeois mentality of beautifying the city and providing it with infrastructures and civic spaces. 

Since the palace belonged to the Royal Patrimony, its free cession to the Queen was requested in 1853 and a first design was commissioned to the architect Juan Redecilla from Burgos, although it was never executed. In 1856, and after having obtained the land, the Consistory requested a new project to the Basque architect Martín Saracíbar, which was the one that was finally carried out, giving rise to the current place, today called Pedro de Navarra, whose works were prolonged in the following years. He planned a rectangular, U-shaped plan, parallel to the royal road to which it opened on one of its long sides. Its elevation consisted of a leave floor with high stone semicircular arcades over which were arranged two floors of plastered brick in which individual balconies rhythmically followed one another. Totally integrated into the whole, in the center of the long bay he placed the town hall, made of stone, with nine openings in each height. To enhance it, he endowed it with columns attached to the arcades, a long balcony on the main floor corresponding to the conference room and, as a crown, a triangular pediment with the coat of arms of the city as a finial. In the building were included diverse dependencies like the almudí, the administrative office, the file or the court, along with a ballroom, while in the place were located the house of the butcher and fishmonger as well as private houses, whose owners, who had acquired the lots between 1855 and 1857, had to adapt the frontispieces, not the interiors, to the project of Saracíbar to achieve the unity of the set.