Palacio de los Momos

The Momos Palace in the city of Zamora, Spain, is a Renaissance building, although it is profusely decorated with elements still typical of Elizabethan Gothic, such as coats of arms, balls, chains and floral, zoomorphic and human motifs. Its façade was declared a National Monument on 14 November 1922.

The building was commissioned by Pedro Rodríguez de Ledesma, commander of Peñausende, knight of the Order of Santiago and alderman of Zamora, married to Marina Herrera; on 12 November 1495, they both instituted an entailed estate that included the main houses in which the founders lived. For a time it was called Casa de los Sanabria.

It was used as an inn and muleteers' house and there was a project in 1931 to convert it into a luxury hotel, but it did not prosper. It currently houses the Provincial Court, which is why it is also known as the Palace of Justice.

Of the original building, built at the end of the 15th century or beginning of the 16th century, only the façade remains, of which the top is missing, as the rest of the building collapsed during the reign of Charles II.

The façade, made of sandstone, which must have been erected before 1495, has two storeys, with the decorative finery and the largest number of windows concentrated on the upper storey. The ground floor has two doors, off-centre with respect to the axis; the main one, with a semicircular arch of large voussoirs, adorns its lower profile with a small arch, flowers and blades, perhaps because these are the heraldic motif of the first quarter of the main coat of arms which corresponds, according to Fernández Duro, to the Sanabria surnames, whose arms are the same as those used by the Rodríguez de Ledesma, Velasco, García de Herrera and Enríquez families. Everything is enclosed within a broken alfiz that starts at about the height of the arch's salmeres (the voussoirs at the ends, also known as the basal voussoirs). In the spandrels there are two plain coats of arms and at the top there is a large-scale cartouche crowning the doorway, supported by two naked savages of different sexes.
Detail of the crowning of the main doorway.

The tall windows are almost all the same and all of them have a mullion or mullion on which the arches, which were lobed and are now twin semicircular, rest. Of the five, four are inscribed in a rectangular alfiz with cardinals and only the one on the left is sheltered by one finished in an ogee arch; in addition to the Gothic leafwork that also appears in the others, there are fighting children and two awkward busts on the parapet, from the upper edge of which rises an impost that subdivides the entire façade, following the Gothic tastes of the Catholic Monarchs. Other ornamental motifs on these windows are dragons and strange animals. Those in the lower section are simpler. They have an alfiz decorated with pomegranates or small balls, and finished with an ogee with a venera in the centre, with a chain running along the entire length below, carved into the stone from the lion's heads. It is not known whether this is by virtue of a specific privilege or whether it is merely decoration to subdivide the surface, to which the Hispano-Flemish decorators were so fond of.

Article obtained from Wikipedia article Wikipedia in his version of 19/08/2022, by various authors under the license Licencia de Documentación Libre GNU.