San Pedro Area

Now let's take a walk west through the heart of Úbeda. Let's start with a quiet doorway whose historical significance is nearly smothered by tree branches.

Enter the Renaissance here

The church of Gothic-Mudejar style church of Santo Domingo rises above its elevated and well-shaded courtyard. The tower we see here (below left) was added in 1702 by architect Francisco Caballero, much later than the rest of this church. Remains of medieval churches going back to the 13th and 14th centuries can be found beneath Santo Domingo’s foundations.


Many churches in eastern Andalusia were named for this saint who supposedly ransomed many captured Christians from the Moors of Granada. Climbing the stairs, we found Santo Domingo tucked into its own quiet pocket park that nearly obscures some of its outstanding details -- Such as this quiet door (below) through which Úbeda walked into its Renaissance century.



The south door is from 1520-25, making it one of the first Plateresque portals in then Gothic and Mudejar Úbeda. How about those stacked columns? Note the vegetable frieze at top -- there is very little religious about this church door. The rest of the church has long since gone over to the secular side as well, having been used as a warehouse and is currently a workshop.

The picture above right shows a detail of the rosettes that decorate these precisely cut arch stones (called voussoirs). The cleric's hat is that of Don Esteban Gabriel Merino, the bishop who commissioned this doorway just as the Renaissance was about to rebuild Úbeda in the 16th century. Previous bishops were pretty staunch proponents of the Gothic. The architect/mason was Diego de Alcaraz, a local. (Andrés de Vandelvira, who was 11 years old at the time, may have later mastered the Renaissance in Úbeda, but Diego introduced it.) During the 5 years that this door is constructed, Francisco de los Cobos will accompany the Emperor on their first trip to Italy where Francisco will discover and bring back the High Renaissance to his home town where this door has already been added to a Gothic church. (Need some historical context? About this time the pope is trying to raise money to rebuild St. Peter’s in Rome by selling indulgences and a young German priest named Martin Luther is fussing with him about it.)

Enough of St. Peter’s in Rome; Let's now go to Úbeda’s St. Peter's square, a mishmash of buildings from the 13th through 19th centuries.

San Pedro Plaza

In the collage below, we see the restoration of the palace of the counts of Guadiana. Temporarily, it's a "see-through building." Like many European restorations, the facade will be retained and a modern building created within it. As a UNESCO world heritage site since 2003, Úbeda requires its old town facades to remain unchanged. Therefore this was (and hopefully will return to being) an extraordinary building. At right in the collage (thanks to Wikipedia) we see an old picture of the palace: including caryatids and, suggestive of Vandelvira’s Vela de los Cobos palace, another set of stark white Doric columns on its corners -- all capped by a large gallery.



Attached to the counts' palace is the simple church of Saint Peter shown below. It's squarish shape suggests that it may have been built over an Arab mosque. Mostly Gothic, its Romanesque apse dates to the 2nd half of the 13th century, shortly after the Christians took back Úbeda. Its Plateresque doorway is obviously much later. This facade was added in 1605 by Alonso Barba, a follower of Vandelvira.  Below right we see a woman holding twins next to the Corinthian column. Set amid Van Goghish swirls, she represents the virtue Charity. (Faith is on the other side of the door holding a cross and supposedly Hope was being reserved for Obama.)


On either side of Saint Peter (below), we have the crest of the bishop of Jaén on whose watch this facade was added: Sancho Dávila.

Los Orozco Palace

St. Peter's is a lovely square with a bit of green. The entire south side is taken up by the monolithic white wall of a Franciscan convent; but the west side has the more recent (19th century) Los Orozco Palace (below).
 

 
This is a French influenced building as seen by the bows above the windows (as seen in the picture below). Úbeda’s most famous writer (after John of the Cross) is the modern Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina who set some of the scenes from his first novel in this palace. (He now lives in New York City.)

Palaces to hotels

A walk through the narrow streets reveals many lovely Renaissance buildings now often used as hotels as is the case here with the elegantly burglar-barred Hotel Ordonez Sandoval shown below:



Below we have the 16th century Rambla Palace with its classical facade including these gentlemen at right leaning on similar coats-of-arms.



Let's venture next to a more modern square that seems to move traffic from the old town into the newer areas: the Plaza de Andalucía.  Join us by clicking here.

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Úbeda, Spain

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