Plaza Mayor of Valladolid

The Plaza Mayor is a central plaza in the city of Valladolid, Spain. It is located only a few blocks away from another famous plaza, the Plaza Zorrilla.

History

Its existence became defined in the mid - thirteenth century when the market moved from the Plaza de Santa Maria to the Market Square, which since the early sixteenth called Plaza Mayor. Individual unions were installed around it, and was the Convent of San Francisco until 1499 the most important building in the vicinity. After that date, as mandated by the Catholic Monarchs was the House of the Municipality who presided over the life of the city.

After its destruction in 1561 because of a serious fire at the old Market Square and thanks to the direct intervention of Philip II, begins its urbanization as a meeting place and coincidence of traders who come from all parts of the Kingdom.

The reconstruction project is the work of Francisco de Salamanca, royal architect, he was born with the modern town square because this is a milestone for Spain and America that it is the great contribution of the Spanish Baroque architecture.huh|date=January 2008

The Plaza Mayor of Valladolid is the first plaza mayor regularly Spain, and closed with arcades, a space intended for use as a market and as a backdrop to the public celebrations so dear to the Habsburg monarchy, which had been designed with large balconies to facilitate the vision of the shows, and served as a model, since the seventeenth century, for many others in Spain (such as Madrid, 1617 or Salamanca, 1729) and South America having an impact even in Italy.

Details

The square is a square plan is completely arcaded porches and rest on their columns or square granite pillars and is open type, ie the streets leading to it without any hindrance or screen. It is surrounded by narrow streets union reminiscent the past and is one of the largest in Spain.Traditionally the houses of the square had a height of three storeys. The distribution of voids was hierarchical. The first floor had balconies, the second antepechos and third, simple windows. This provision has echoes vitrubianos. This original appearance was changing over time until the present, in which all voids all floors have balconies. It is chaired by the statue of repoblador of the city, Pedro Ansúrez conducted in 1903 by Aurelio Carretero.

In the northern flank of its rectangular layout, stands the Casa Consistorial seat of the Town Hall of Valladolid. The former, which survived until 1879, dating from the sixteenth century, but had been reformed over time. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century, he had incorporated a tower for the clock in the center of the facade. The existing building had a long genesis. First convened a design contest for the new consistory vallisoletano, a project which won the local architect Antonio Iturralde, who presented a draft that, while the winner, not liked too. Iturralde died in 1897 and took over the works Enrique Repullés and Vargas, who overthrew everything made of the draft Iturralde and built a new building eclectic in nature beaux-artiano, completed in 1908. This is the edifio current City Hall vallisoletano.

Faced with this building is Zorrilla Theater, opened in 1884. It is situated in the same place in which they lift up part of the disappeared Convent of San Francisco, set monastic immense, totally demolished between 1835 and 1850 and covered the whole space between the current streets of Santiago Montero Calvo and Duque de la Victoria . The current constitution street is located on the defunct gothic church of the monastery and the street and Menendez Pelayo on several units and old orchards.

At present, it has tried to return to the original homogeneity through certain mechanisms, such as the red paint all facades of the buildings, some historic and aesthetically questionable.

References

* Text translated from the Spanish Wikipedia article.

External links