Palacio de Anaya

The Palacio de Anaya in Salamanca, Spain, is a mid-18th-century Neoclassical building erected by Spanish builders as a replacement for an earlier collegiate foundation. It stands on the site of the Colegio Mayor of San Bartolomé, a college whose founding is linked to Diego de Anaya Maldonado, and it became an important part of the city’s university quarter during the modern era.

The original college suffered severe damage in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Construction of the present structure is dated to the mid-1700s: one chronology places the start of works in 1760, while another record gives a span of activity between 1697 and 1767. Design and execution are attributed to architects working in the Neoclassical idiom of that period, producing the compact, ordered composition seen today.

An adjoining hospedería, erected in 1715 in a Baroque manner, was built to lodge students who served wealthier pupils; over time it was adapted to hold classrooms and offices, and its former stables were converted into a faculty dining room. Following the later suppression of the university colleges, the main building passed through several civic uses, including housing the Civil Government, a role that led locals to refer to it as a “palace” despite its collegiate origin.

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the building returned to academic use. It now accommodates the University of Salamanca’s Faculty of Philology and contains a library. The complex, together with the neighbouring hospedería and the church of San Sebastián, received legal protection as a cultural property in 2011 (with one record giving the date 6 October 2011). The palace fronts Salamanca’s New Cathedral and sits adjacent to the Baroque church of San Sebastián, which served as the college chapel and today functions as a parish of the cathedral.