Casa del Vizconde o Casa Grande
Monument
, Los Villares
The palace of the Viscount of Los Villares, in Los Villares (Province of Jaén, Spain), constitutes the only civil construction contemporary to the founding of the town in the 16th century. It is known by the villagers as "Casa Grande", due to its notoriously larger size than the rest of the village, or "Casa del Vizconde", because it belonged to the family of Don Francisco Zeballos y Villegas, the first Viscount of Los Villares.
It is a manor house that follows the rural Castilian and Upper Andalusian Renaissance models, with stone facades, articulated around a lintelled patio configured by a woody supporting structure of girders, beautiful footings and uprights of considerable plastic and artisanal value. and open in its main facade by an elegant high gallery of semicircular arches.
The built volume, which rests on a basement with stone vaults, has two floors connected by a staircase that starts from one corner of the patio. The walls are made of rubble and mud of remarkable thickness; the logs forged and in the configuration of the main patio large square girders were used. The covering system is also woody, with reinforcing bars and files under Arabic tile.
In the center of the construction is the main patio, with another secondary or orchard at the rear. The main courtyard, with a square plan, is visually reduced from its original proportions by adding partitions that allowed two of the galleries to be protected and a third to be used as a room, leaving only the northern section open today. As a result of these modifications, the wooden elements were altered, among which the large footings with decoration of scrolls, spirals, crosses, etc. stand out. They are also to mention some coffered doors.
From the northeast corner of the patio starts the staircase, in a single section, covered by a half orange decorated with a central rosette and supported by pendentives decorated by small plaster cherub heads. The top of the staircase offers a double lowered semicircular arch elevation that separates a factory buttress.
The first floor houses rooms for bedrooms with plaster shells on the entrance lintels. On the second floor there are three chambers, among which the one that offers a façade to Jardin Street stands out, open with a gallery of eight semi-circular arches.
The portal, located under this arcade, is tall and sober and is made up of simple Tuscan pilasters that flank the lintelled bay.
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