Palacio del Marqués de Santa Cruz

The Palacio del Marqués de Santa Cruz in Viso del Marqués, Spain, is a sixteenth-century palace built for the Spanish noble Álvaro de Bazán, 1st Marquis of Santa Cruz. Construction began on 15 November 1564 and continued through 1586, producing a Renaissance residence with strong mannerist elements. Erected for a leading commander of the Spanish fleet during the Habsburg era, the palace attracted royal attention and played a role in the courtly and naval culture of its time.

Work on the building took place between 1564 and 1586 and involved a team of designers, painters and decorators. Álvaro de Bazán maintained two palaces; this one was used in part because it lay roughly midway on the road between Madrid and Seville during the reign of Philip II. The palace’s painted decoration impressed the king, who later commissioned the same artists for projects at El Escorial and at the Alcázar of Toledo.

During the early eighteenth century, in the fighting of the War of the Spanish Succession, troops supporting the Austrian claimant under Edward Hamilton nearly destroyed the palace. The marquis’s chaplain, the poet Carlos de Praves, intervened and the building avoided complete loss. In 1755 the Lisbon earthquake caused the roof of the main hall (the salón de honor) to collapse; that failure destroyed the large pictorial representation of the Battle of Lepanto and caused the four corner towers to lose their upper portions.

In the early nineteenth century, during the Peninsular War against Napoleonic France, French forces razed the palace. Political turmoil in the decades after left the building altered in use; in March and April 1823 King Ferdinand VII slept at the palace as he departed Madrid for Seville ahead of the advance of the French army known as the “Hundred Thousand Sons of Saint Louis,” a military intervention that aimed to restore Bourbon authority in Spain. By the period leading to the Spanish Civil War the structure had been repurposed repeatedly, serving as a granary, a school, stables, a prison and a hospital.

The state recognized the building’s value in 1931 when it was declared a National Monument. In 1948 Doña Casilda de Silva Fernández de Henestrosa, a descendant of Álvaro de Bazán, rented the palace to the Spanish Navy for a ninety-year term. Under the direction of naval authorities the palace was restored beginning in 1948. The Navy first housed the Spanish Naval Museum there and then established the General Archive of the Spanish Navy “Don Álvaro de Bazán,” a state archive managed by the Ministry of Defence that holds naval records from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, with the archive taking up residence around 1950.