Almudí Palace, Murcia, Spain

The Renaissance-style Almudí Palace, a historic building from the 15th century, is currently a municipal art centre and has magnificent exhibition rooms, with a stable and continuous programme. The building has undergone various modifications throughout its history

It is a unique building from the 15th century with an imposing appearance and a colonnaded courtyard that takes us back to Baroque Murcia. It was an old grain warehouse, the first idea of building a public warehouse in Murcia, for the cereals collected, as well as for the tithes is attributed to King Alfonso X the Wise, in the 13th century.

Its original structure caught fire in 1612 when lightning struck the powder magazine that was temporarily stored there and destroyed a large part of the building, which was later rebuilt.

This carving, emblematic of the city, is the representation of a woman, a midwife, breastfeeding a child next to her own, symbolising and paying tribute to the hospitality of the city of Murcia. The pelican crowning the relief is a symbol of abundance.

The main door of the Almudí Palace is crowned by an enormous royal coat of arms of the Habsburgs, flanked by two smaller coats of arms of Murcia, which have only six crowns as they predate the reign of Philip V, the monarch who granted the seventh crown to the city of Murcia.

In 1886 the building was converted into the Judicial Court, and today it houses the city archive, located on the first floor, where files and administrative documentation on Murcia and the huerta (market garden) have been kept since the 13th century.

Inside, there is a grandiose hall with Tuscan columns, which is currently used as an exhibition hall, and a stretch of the Arab wall that surrounded the city of Murcia, which serves as a load-bearing wall for the building itself, as the Almudí was built on top of this defensive construction.

References:

Murcia Tourism

Palaces, manors and town halls in Spain

User Reviews

Areeb Barr Abdullah (8 months ago)
The place is super neat and the art is top notch.

Anne Gould (14 months ago)
The building was more interesting than the contents

Víctor (3 years ago)
Renaissance palace that is worth visiting for anyone interested in architecture and history and is reminiscent of other buildings with similar characteristics erected, for example, in territories of the former Crown of Aragon such as Zaragoza. Its current main elements date from the 17th century and its pretty name derives from an old measure of grain, as it was once a cereal warehouse. Free admission when there are exhibitions. The room with the columns is particularly beautiful.

Nur Peller (3 years ago)
The Almudí Palace is a superb 15th century building, located in the center of Murcia, next to the gardens of the boardwalk. Inside it houses an Exhibition Hall, known as the Hall of Columns, and the rooms of the Historical Archive. The Almudí Palace performs an important task in disseminating the cultural heritage of the Region of Murcia. It hosts a regular number of temporary exhibitions throughout the year, publishes a series of interesting documents, and the doors of the archive remain open to researchers of regional history. Inside there was a very nice exhibition

Dario Vigueras (4 years ago)
Art Center with a very nice interior. The column room is beautiful. Highly recommended

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