They were spared from the tragedy as were some of the paintings that hung on the Alcázar’s walls.Īfter the frantic mayhem following the initial fire alarm, a heroic effort was made to save some of the art while the blaze raged on. In preparation for a new bout of construction, a large part of the collection that had been amassed in the previous century by the art-loving Habsburgs had been relocated to a different palace shortly before the fire. It was this propensity for remodeling that provided one of the spots of light on that devastating Christmas Eve. (“Alcázar” means “castle” in Arabic.)Īfter the Christians regained control and ultimately installed the Spanish monarchy, each successive ruler put his own touch on the palace he inherited-a little nip-tuck over here, a massive architectural enhancement over there. It was originally built by Emir Mohamed I, the ruler of what would become Madrid, following the Moors’ conquest of the Iberian peninsula. In the end, the Alcázar burned to the ground, taking with it more than 500 works from the Spanish royal family’s art collection.īuilt in the mid-ninth century, the Alcázar was witness to nearly a thousand years of Spanish history. “But several hundred works of art were consumed by the flames.” “For fear of looting, the fortress doors had been ordered shut, which hampered evacuation efforts, though in the end there was little loss of life, with only a handful of palace attendants dying in the blaze,” Jules Stewart writes in Madrid: The History. Then, of course, there was the fact that the majority of the castle’s occupants were confined to the chapel, unable to quickly attend to the growing inferno. When he finally did raise the alarm, the fire bells are thought to have been mistaken for the expected chimes that ushered in the holiday celebrations. The story goes that Ranc’s failing eyesight led to a delay in his detecting the flames.
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