Palacio de Ayerbe: Palace of the Marquises of Urriés
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.3
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Crown of Aragon, French, Spanish
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Elite Residence
On this page9 sections
History
Construction and noble patronage
Palacio de Ayerbe, also known as the Palace of the Marquises of Urriés, is a noble palace in Ayerbe, Spain, built under Hugo de Urriés, the eighth lord of the Barony of Ayerbe, and his wife, Greyda de Lanuza. Hugo de Urriés was the building’s patron. The palace belongs to the civil architecture of Aragon and is attributed to the late fifteenth century, although its Gothicizing features have also led to the possibility of an early sixteenth-century date. Its northern frontage helped define the square laid out before it, and family connections associate it with the Urriés castle at Biniés.
A gallery and the remains of an interior courtyard belong to the sixteenth century and reflect the palace’s later Renaissance phase. These additions formed part of the building’s development as a residence of the Urriés family, whose later title, marquis, was a hereditary rank below duke and above count.
Wartime destruction and commercial use
During the Peninsular War, the 1808–1814 conflict in which Spain and its allies fought Napoleon’s forces, French troops appear to have fortified the palace. They dug a moat around it and used stone from the Collegiate Church of San Pedro. The fighting and fortification works almost completely destroyed the building.
By the early twentieth century, the Coiduras family owned Palacio de Ayerbe and operated a flourishing commercial establishment there. The business began to decline during the 1970s and closed permanently at the end of the following decade, marking the end of that phase in the building’s use.
Protection and renewed use
Palacio de Ayerbe was declared a Historic-Artistic Monument on 3 June 1931. On 3 September 2003, this protection was supplemented by designation as a Bien de Interés Cultural, a legally protected category for culturally important property in Spain under Aragonese Cultural Heritage Law 3/1999.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, María José and Marta Coiduras sold the palace to José María Romeo and Carmen Ruiz, who directed the Allegro music school in Madrid. Since 2004, the building has housed the private music school Palacio de la Música “El Pilar.” Its continuing educational use has supported maintenance and comprehensive restoration.
Remains
Façade and square frontage
The palace forms the northern frontage of Ayerbe’s central square. Its principal façade is made of ashlar, meaning regularly cut and carefully dressed stone blocks, and is framed by two large corner towers. The square-facing elevation is topped by reconstructed ashlar battlements, the crenellated projections along a defensive wall, in a form considered close to the original. Earlier views show that the towers were truncated and covered by simple roofs, while a projecting eave extended above the upper gallery. These earlier arrangements appear in a nineteenth-century engraving and in a nineteenth-century photograph by Santiago Ramón y Cajal.
A large round-arched entrance occupies the façade. Its arch is formed from voussoirs, the wedge-shaped stones that make up an arch, and carries a coat of arms with a seventeenth-century sundial above it. The openings are arranged asymmetrically and fitted with lintels. On the principal floor, some openings contain three small internal arches framed by molding in the form of an alfiz, a rectangular ornamental border around an arch or opening.
Upper gallery and windows
Between the two towers, the upper floor contains a gallery of paired small arches and tripartite windows. Each window may originally have held two slender columns, which disappeared at an unknown date. Some Gothic windows were modernized in more recent times, while the surviving upper elevation preserves the relationship between the towered façade and its gallery.
Renaissance courtyard remains
The remains of the Renaissance interior courtyard consist of two wings. In the lower section of the eastern wing, two columns with capitals are embedded in the wall. Their distance from the upper level suggests that they supported a lintelled platform carrying the upper gallery. The surviving upper eastern and southern wings are divided into rooms and are poorly preserved. They retain sections of semicircular arches resting on slender columns set on parapets with medallions. The medallions once carried busts of figures, but those busts no longer survive.
Set farther back above the southern wing is a gallery of brick arches that are now blocked. It retains parts of an eave with distinctly Gothicizing features. The former courtyard has been converted into a street connecting the square with the palace entrance, changing the physical organization of this part of the building while preserving its connection to the palace frontage.
Interior spaces and present adaptation
Some interior rooms retain Renaissance coffered ceilings, which are ceilings decorated with recessed panels. The building has otherwise been extensively altered for use as a music school, including the creation of dormitories and other rooms for musicians attending courses and workshops. The more aristocratic part of the palace became an assembly hall, and only small remnants of its former elaborate furnishings remain. A grand staircase leads to the principal reception hall.
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