Mencos Palace: Ancestral Residence and Historic Wine Cellar in Tafalla
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Kingdom of Navarre, Spanish
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page13 sections
History
Mencos Palace is a late-sixteenth-century ancestral residence in Tafalla, Spain, built for the Mencos family around 1590 or slightly later. León Mencos y López de Dicastillo purchased land outside the town gates and ordered the construction of the house, placing the family arms on its facade. The palace stands within the long history of a lineage closely connected with Tafalla and with the royal houses of Navarre and France.
The Mencos family in Tafalla
The Mencos family is recorded in Tafalla from 1420, when Juan de Mencos was a merchant serving King Charles III of Navarre. With his brother Pedro, he worked as a carter on the construction of Tafalla Royal Palace and later Olite Royal Palace. A Juan de Mencos was described as a squire in 1443, and by 1446 Juan de Mencos y Olano was a hidalgo, a member of Spain’s lower hereditary nobility, serving in the army with arms and a horse.
In 1455, Juan de Mencos y Olano married María de Echáuz y Beaumont, daughter of the Viscount of Baigorri. This alliance linked the Mencos lineage with the royal houses of Navarre and France. The family’s subsequent descent remained strongly tied to Tafalla and continued through the present generation.
Construction and family residence
Before establishing the palace, the family lived near the Church of Santa María. León Mencos’s decision to build outside the gates placed the new residence on a small hill beside the royal road to Olite and opposite Tafalla’s former walls. The palace became the family’s principal residence and remained so until 1770.
That year, Joaquín José Mencos Areizaga, Count of Guenduláin, Baron of Bigüezal, and Alcaide of the Alcázares of Tafalla, married Magdalena Eslava, Marchioness of Real Defensa and Countess of Fresno de la Fuente. An Alcaide was responsible for the custody and administration of a royal fortress or palace. After the marriage, the couple moved their principal residence to the Real Defensa house on Zapatería Street in Pamplona. Mencos Palace remained a secondary residence until it again became the family’s principal house in the mid-twentieth century.
Martín Carlos de Mencos, born in Tafalla in 1597, held the offices of Alcaide of the Alcázares of Tafalla, general of the royal armies, and governor of Guatemala. He died without descendants and left his fortune to the Recollect Franciscan Conceptionists. His bequest enabled the foundation of their convent in the mid-seventeenth century, and the nuns took possession of it around 1671.
Royal connections and nineteenth-century wars
The palace received royal guests during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Isabella Farnese, second wife of Philip V, stayed there in 1714 while traveling from France after her proxy marriage to the king. Ferdinand VII and his wife, María Amalia of Saxony, stayed at the palace in 1828. The royal-lodging chains above the entrance were granted after this visit. Alfonso XII visited wounded patients there in 1875, when the building was being used as a Red Cross hospital.
The Peninsular War, the Spanish phase of the wider conflict against Napoleonic France from 1808 to 1814, brought a military occupation to the house. French forces held the palace from 1808 to 1813. It served as a residence for commanders and officers and as offices for the area’s military command. Marshal Bon Adrien Jeannot de Moncey established his headquarters in Tafalla in 1808, and French forces left the town on February 10, 1813.
During the First Carlist War, a nineteenth-century civil conflict over the Spanish succession and competing political and religious visions, the palace became a barracks for the Cristino army from 1833 to 1839. Cristino forces supported the succession of Isabella II, while the Carlists backed the rival claim of Carlos María Isidro.
The building was used again during the Third Carlist War. In 1875 and 1876 it became a Red Cross hospital, described as the first Red Cross hospital in Spain. The organization’s medical and relief services expanded during nineteenth-century wars. The property had been requested both for military accommodation and for medical use, but it was assigned to the Red Cross. After the war ended in 1876 and the last patient left, the palace was returned to the family.
In 1873, liberal forces occupied several buildings in Tafalla, including the Royal Palace and nearby convents. The stone arch linking Mencos Palace with the Recollect Franciscan Conceptionist convent was demolished with explosives after the commanding general objected to the connection. Joaquín Ignacio Mencos, Count of Guenduláin, tried to prevent its destruction. The convent’s nuns were temporarily sheltered in the palace.
Wine production and twentieth-century recovery
The palace’s wine cellar was installed in the mid-eighteenth century and reached its greatest activity about a century later. Its wines were sold chiefly in Spain and France and were also exported to England and Cuba. The cellar ceased operating after the late-nineteenth-century phylloxera epidemic, when the vine pest destroyed nearly all the family’s vineyards.
At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, the palace was requisitioned and used as a school for non-commissioned officers from 1936 to 1939. From 1939 to 1943 it housed a Civil Guard barracks, a facility used by Spain’s national gendarmerie-type security force. Tiburcio Mencos y Bernaldo de Quirós became the owner after his father’s death in 1936 and sought the return of the property. The family recovered it during the 1940s, while restoration and repairs had begun in 1940 under Tiburcio and continued later under his son, Joaquín Ignacio Mencos Doussinague.
The Mencos family has owned the palace from its construction to the present. The succession includes León Mencos y López de Dicastillo from 1590, Martín Carlos de Mencos y Arbizu from 1615, Gabriel de Mencos y Arbizu from 1669, José Carlos de Mencos y Van Quesel de Loaisa from 1674, José Sebastián de Mencos y Ayanz de Navarra from 1700, Rafael de Mencos y Ayanz de Navarra from 1750, Joaquín José de Mencos y Areyzaga from 1759, Joaquín María Mencos y Eslava from 1817, Joaquín Ignacio Mencos from 1852, Joaquín María Mencos y Ezpeleta from 1882, Tiburcio Mencos y Bernaldo de Quirós from 1936, and Joaquín Ignacio Mencos y Doussinague in the present generation.
Today the palace is the seat of the Mencos Foundation and a center for sociocultural activities. The family has vineyards in the Valdorba valley and, in collaboration with Vega del Castillo winery, bottles wine under the name Marqués de la Real Defensa. The palace has comprehensive heritage protection, while its family archive preserves wine-sale invoices, vineyard records, information on grape quality, and experiments with viticultural and cellar processes.
Remains
Mencos Palace occupies a small hill beside the former royal road to Olite, opposite the line of Tafalla’s demolished walls. Its surviving elements include the main facade, the family arms, the royal-lodging chains, the garden, the former connection to the convent, and a substantially preserved section of the historic wine cellar. Together, these features show the house’s residential, ceremonial, and agricultural functions.
Facade and royal entrance
Family arms and heraldic display
The main facade carries the Mencos coat of arms together with the arms of Cembiráin, Armendáriz, López del Castillo, and Balda. The heraldic display preserves the family’s connections as expressed on the exterior of the residence. Chains above the entrance indicate that the building received royal guests and relate to the stay of Ferdinand VII and María Amalia of Saxony in 1828.
Former connecting arch
A stone arch once joined the palace to the Recollect Franciscan Conceptionist convent. The connection was built when the convent was established, about one generation after the palace. During the Third Carlist War, it was destroyed with explosives after a military commander objected to the link. The palace also contains the garden associated with the historic property.
Wine cellar and production spaces
Surviving cellar
Half of the former wine installation survives with its original floor, whitewashed walls, whitewashed vaulted ceiling, and period oak vats. The other half was converted into a dining room, which contains a table made from a single large slab. Several former press screws have been adapted as lamps and remain as decorative features in the cellar.
Pressing and fermentation room
Grape pressing took place in an upper room rather than in the cellar. Grapes were deposited and selected there, and the press stood in the same space. Alcoholic fermentation and the punching down of grape skins also occurred in that room. Must then passed through conduits to the cellar vats for malolactic fermentation, a secondary process that converts malic acid into softer lactic acid. Bottling was carried out on the same level.
Cellar displays
The cellar is decorated with bullfighting motifs, including Goya-style engravings and other bullfighting prints. It also displays silk programs from different years of the San Fermín festivals. The family’s collection of San Fermín programs and memorabilia was exhibited in the palace in 2008 under the title “125 Years of Memories at San Fermín.” Other displays include an exhibition of agricultural products from 1857, a silver-medal diploma from the 1889 Paris Universal Exhibition, and a 1912 National Viticulture Congress diploma.
The cellar also preserves an 1857 diploma for Tafalla wines, issued to the Count of Guenduláin and signed by Queen Isabella II. These objects accompany the physical remains of the wine installation and the family archive’s records of vineyards, grape quality, sales, and experiments in wine-making.
