Palais du Marquis San Félix, Oviedo

The palais du Marquis San Félix in Oviedo, Spain is an early 18th-century Baroque urban palace built for members of the Spanish nobility. Erected in the first third of the 1700s, it was commissioned by the marquis of Vallecerrato and his wife, the duchess of Parque, and quickly became one of the larger noble residences in the city. Its size, prominent façade onto a main square, and long sequence of civic and private uses made the building a visible presence in Oviedo’s civic life from the 18th century onward.

The site was assembled from three adjoining houses that stood beside the local theatre in the Plaza del Fontán. Those houses had been brought together under a family entail established in the late 17th century, and when the owner died in 1723 his daughter inherited the plots and moved ahead with a new palace. Work began around the mid-1720s and continued into the 1730s, producing a square-plan residence with a central courtyard and a garden behind its city façade.

Into the 19th century the ducal line retained ownership, but the building undertook public roles. In 1794 the owners let the house to the municipal government and it was used as an arms workshop for portable firearms. From 1855 the workshop was run by an officer who later became a general, and in 1857 the factory was moved to premises at the former monastery of Santa María de la Vega. After that period the palace served a variety of leased functions, housing a tobacco works, a short-lived post office in the mid-1860s, a recreational society, and for a time between 1884 and 1892 a school run by a religious institute.

Title to the palace passed through several private hands in the late 19th century. The ducal family sold the property in 1887 and it changed ownership again in 1892, when Antonio Sarri y Oller acquired it and undertook a thorough restoration. Around the turn of the 20th century the new owner had the main façade reworked, replacing the original heraldic stones with a new set carved in 1901. The restored residence remained in that family for more than a century and continued to function as a private home.

During the siege of Oviedo in the Spanish Civil War the palace was used by the Francoist authorities as the provisional seat of the town council. In the early 20th century the house also became the long-term home for a celebrated painting group, El Greco’s twelve-canvas Apostolado, which the marquis acquired in 1905–1906 to prevent its export and kept at the palace until 2002. That group of paintings was sold to an industrial company in 2002, transferred to the State as part payment of taxes, and subsequently deposited at the Museum of Fine Arts of Asturias. The palace remains a lived-in private residence of the marquis of Valdeterrazo’s family and has been kept in very good condition.