"Description
Palace house from the 16th century , consisting of a ground floor, an upper floor and a tower, remodeled in the 19th century .
The building currently called Palacio de Abrantes is located in a large irregular block in the urban center of Granada. The space it occupies within this block is an irregular plot of small dimensions with a single main façade towards the square of Tovar, the remaining sides of the plot forming dividing walls with other buildings in the block and an interior façade facing a patio of lights in the party wall opposite the exterior façade.
Originally, the building must have had a typology based on the hall-peristyle patio-side staircase-gallery scheme on the first floor, but nothing remains of this organization, probably due to reforms in the 19th century, except for some load-bearing walls, the staircase, the cover and the façade, with its cover and arrangement of holes.
The palace has two floors, ground floor and first floor, and its interior is accessed through a hallway with two side rooms, which are entered through rectangular openings with twin single-leaf wooden doors decorated with jonquils that form motifs of lacería, both rooms have a rectangular floor plan and are covered by a double-order alfarje without decoration on simple footings or wooden wedges that comprise the two rooms and the hall.
In the front of the hallway there is a plaster arch, raised by some steps, which reproduces a Nasrid one on paired white marble columns, reused Nasrid originals, which gives access to a distributor with a room on the left side with a rectangular floor plan covered with a alfarje of double order of beams with decoration of stars in the streets and that continues in the distributor.
The staircase has three flights and is covered with an octagonal armor of Mohamar limes on flat pendentives with the almizate combed and decorated with bows, as well as the lower part of the skirts and the pendentives .
The roofs of the building are inclined skirts of curved ceramic tiles towards the main façade and terraced towards the inner courtyard, forming a very compact volumetric ensemble, only the tower stands out, and in perfect relationship with the floor of the building.
The exterior façade is structured on two floors. The lower floor is made up of vertical rectangular windows closed with bars and with a frieze of lobed arches in the upper part. Offset to the left is the main doorway, made of stone, with a rectangular opening framed by two semicircular arches, superimposed on one ogee shaped by thin baquetones and flanked by pinnacles, while on both sides are the coats of arms of the Boabadilla family, left, and Peñalosa, right; the façade as a whole is completed with a Gothic pilaster with arches and leaf capitals at each end.
On the first floor there are balconies, the wider one falling over the central door, decorated in jambs and lintel with moldings. The set is finished off by an eaves with a brick cornice painted Almagro red forming flat corbels . On the far left, this facade has a chamfer where it joins the adjoining building, and on the far right there is a small perpendicular body.
History
The Palacio de Abrantes is a construction from the beginning of the 16th century , to which corresponds the cover of the main façade and the coffered ceilings of the staircase and the main hall, today hidden by a sheathing. These are the last testimonies of the original layout of the building that underwent a remodeling that destroyed it in the 19th century . According to Gómez-Moreno, the building had a central patio with galleries on Gothic columns of freestone, ceilings with Gothic and Mudejar cutouts, and columns from Arab buildings in the corridors, of which only four remain in the hallway.
The promoter of the palace must have been Don Antonio de Bobadilla y Peñalosa, son of one of the conquerors of Granada, Francisco Peñalosa, from whom he will inherit the lordships of Pinos and Beas and the dukedom of Abrantes.
The monument in its origins must have been a Gothic and Mudejar palace. Of these styles, only the Gothic façade and the ceilings of various rooms are preserved; alfarjes of the lower floor and the upper room and the armor of the staircase and the main hall, later covered by the plaster ceiling that can be seen today. The transformations it underwent in the 19th century have turned it into a historicist -style building today , in accordance with the aesthetic tastes of this period, in which neo-Arabic elements -Alhambrism- are mixed in the decoration of the entrance hall arches and Neo-Renaissance in the decoration of the rooms on the upper floor."
(
visit link)