Take a look at the light blue facade on your right, anchored by wrought-iron balconies and an imposing stone doorway topped with a carved crest. This is the Casa del Corregidor, the former headquarters and home of the royal magistrate appointed by the Crown. But the orderly, symmetrical exterior is essentially a mask hiding centuries of chaotic adaptation.
This site has been built, demolished, and rebuilt over generations. In fact, modern archaeological excavations revealed that beneath this foundation lie ancient dwellings carved directly into the living natural rock. These dark, cavernous spaces were later repurposed as a sprawling dungeon where prisoners were crowded together along the cliffside.
By the eighteenth century, that primitive royal prison was torn down to make way for a grand architectural reinvention. The renowned architect José Martín de Aldehuela took over the site in 1765 and designed the baroque building you see today, utilizing the dramatic, highly detailed architectural style popular at the time. He engineered a massive expansion, presenting three dignified floors to the main street, while an astonishing seven floors plunge down the back of the building into the gorge.
This new design created smaller, individualized cells to separate prisoners, but as the centuries rolled on, the building's uses became wonderfully bizarre. In the nineteenth century, the office of the Corregidor was abolished. The government kept the prison and the provincial courts here, but for some reason, they decided it was also the perfect place to open a school for boys. The school children regularly crossed paths with the inmates, even leaving behind wooden doors carved with the names of the students.
The strange layers of history here were nearly lost entirely. In 1995, students working in the building found a massive pile of historical papers dumped in the old jail cells. Deciding to protect them, they sealed the documents behind a brick wall. It took until 2011 for archaeologists to break through and rediscover the stash. What they found was staggering... centuries of legal documents, discarded weapons, and files detailing the harrowing bombings of the city during the Spanish Civil War.
People just keep tearing down and remaking their spaces out of sheer necessity. We will see that cycle of destruction and reinvention play out again very shortly. For now, let us move on toward the Church of Santa Cruz, which is just a two minute walk away.
