Palacio de Abrantes

Historical context

The palace of Abrantes was built in 1652, and its architect is Juan Maza. The palace of Abrantes is a baroque style building that was commissioned by Juan de Valencia. It was constructed when Juan de Valencia bought some houses that are now the palace of Abrantes. The first time it was remodeled, was in 1844 by Anibal Álvarez. In 1888, it was bought by Ignacio Escobar who transformed it into the “Instituto Italiano di Cultura.” Nowadays it is the «Instituto Italiano di Cultura,» it is the Italian embassy in Spain and promotes Italian culture and art.

360 photo

Antonio Vivaldi-summer storm-rock version

Architectural style

 

It is a baroque style building designed by Juan Maza and commissioned by Juan de Valencia. It has two flags at the entrance. At first, it had two capitels on each side of the palace, but they were removed.

Geological aspects

We havent found anything about what materials compose the palace, but we think that is made up of this rocks:

Limestone: Limestone is a durable, hard material, and it’s easy to find. It is a sedimentary rock mainly composed of marine skeletal fragments, such as coral. It was very used in the XIX century and nowadays, it is very common in North American and European architecture. The walls of the palace are made of limestone.

Granite: Granite is a hard rock composed of little grains that was obtained by using hand tools with very poor results, and it has been used a lot for construction in human history. The door frame of the palace and the columns behind are made up of granite.

Obtention of rocks

Limestone: in that period a lot of limestone was etracted from the cuarries of levantina, and also it could be obtained from Calizas del Terciario.

Granite: may be the granite could be extracted from the  cantera de granito de Aldepetre.

Comparative

If we compared the materials used in the Palacio de abrantes, we can see that it has granite in the columns of the door and limestone

If we compared the materials used on the Iglesia de San Sebatián, we can see that  this buildings have almost the same materials, like the Granite or the limestone.

Webliography:

https://www.google.es/search?client=tablet-android-samsung&biw=1024&bih=768&ei=DWpCWa-tBenLgAbctaewAw&q=minas+de+granito+en+madrid&oq=minas+de+granito+en+madrid&gs_l=mobile-gws-serp.3…9838.11068.0.11810.5.5.0.0.0.0.247.928.0j3j2.5.0….0…1.1j4.64.mobile-gws-serp..1.0.0.OSmhI9n42UY#istate=lrl:iv&rlimm=12611099987448519330

 

By: Yago Ortiz, Sergio Rodriguez, Jorge Calvo, Miguel Eke