Hidden from the eyes of the city. Behind the walls of number ten Guzman el Bueno street, very close to the Santa Cruz parish, the remains of a Sevillian house from the second half of the 14th century are hidden. There are barely two rooms left from the primitive construction, but it is one of the most outstanding examples of Mudejar architecture in the city. The Casa de Olea, today a children’s education center and home of San Jose de la Montana, has more than evident similarities with the palace that King Pedro I ordered to be built in the Real Alcazar. The house has undergone important transformations carried out in the 16th, 18th and 19th centuries, but its horseshoe arches, alfarjes, tiled plinths, portals or its impressive plasterwork transport the visitor to the Middle Ages.
La Casa de Olea has a typical Sevillian stately home organization in this area. Its construction, as historians agree, is somewhat later than the Mudejar Palace of the Alcazar, as the architect Honorio Aguilar, an expert in Mudejar architecture, explains: “It seems to be from the second half of the 14th century. the great hall, today converted into a chapel, and the girls’ bedroom. Subsequently, reforms were made using the Mudejar language”.
After accessing through the stop, a bent axis leads to the courtyard with a square floor plan porticoed on three of its sides. “It is probably later, but there should already be one in the fourteenth century, contemporary to the chapel.” The chapel is the great jewel of the house and preserves practically all its original elements. Its typological plant organization is a square room with two axes. “The size indicates a little the dimensions that the house could have had in its day,” Aguilar points out. The room is surrounded by wide walls and is embraced by two corridors, one of which has a medieval coffered ceiling painted with heraldic and plant motifs. The bow wheel tiles and the plasterwork with ataurique decoration, Kufic inscriptions and scallops on the intrados of the arch stand out. The current dome was probably incorporated in the XIX.
Despite its great historical and artistic interest, this house has received very little study: “There are not so many examples of Mudejar domestic architecture, and more of this size. There are elements in the Casa de los Pinelo, the Palacio de los Marqueses de la Algaba, Las Duenas, or the House of Pilate, although a large part of these constructions are later and use the Mudejar language in their construction”. The Casa de Olea has been declared an Asset of Cultural Interest (BIC) and has the maximum protection in the PGOU.
