Torre de la Parada

The Torre de la Parada is a former royal hunting lodge located in the Monte de El Pardo in Fuencarral-El Pardo, near the Royal Palace of El Pardo outside Madrid in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Established in the mid sixteenth century and transformed into a decorative showcase under Philip IV in the 1630s, the lodge became renowned for its ambitious cycle of mythological and portrait paintings commissioned from Peter Paul Rubens and Diego Velazquez. Though the building was largely destroyed by fire during the War of the Spanish Succession, its surviving artistic program constitutes a major holding of the Museo Nacional del Prado.

The structure was originally built between 1547 and 1549 by the architect Luis de Vega, commissioned by the future Philip II as a small fortress with four corner towers. In 1635, Philip IV, an avid hunter, initiated a major architectural and decorative project to transform the building into a representative hunting pavilion and resting place. The Spanish architect Juan Gomez de Mora led the renovation starting in 1636. The lodge reached its artistic peak between 1635 and 1640, serving as a secluded royal retreat compared to the Palacio del Buen Retiro. An inventory taken around 1700 during the testamentary proceedings of Charles II cataloged 176 paintings in the building. Subsequently, the best paintings were moved elsewhere beginning in 1710. During the War of the Spanish Succession, Austrian troops attacked and looted the site, setting it on fire, with scholarly sources variously dating this destruction to 1710 or 1714. A lightning strike on the roof in 1806 further contributed to its ruin, leaving only foundations and ruins visible today.

The decorative program of the lodge centered on a large series of mythological paintings based on Ovid's Metamorphoses, commissioned from Rubens in 1636. The cycle comprised over sixty large format canvases executed in Antwerp. Rubens provided oil sketches and reserved the execution of fourteen paintings for himself, while his collaborators, including Jacob Jordaens, Theodoor van Thulden, Erasmus Quellinus II, Jan Cossiers, Peeter Symons, Cornelis de Vos, Peter Snayers, Thomas Willeboirts Bosschaert, and Jan Boeckhorst, completed the rest according to his designs. To allow the actual painters to sign their works and avoid confusion, Rubens permitted them to claim authorship. Complementing the Flemish mythological series, Spanish painters Felix Castelo and Jusepe Leonardo contributed landscapes of the royal sites. Velazquez provided hunting and equestrian portraits, philosopher paintings, and jester portraits, creating a cohesive display of classical imagery and Habsburg power appropriate for the Spanish court.

The most significant surviving works from the lodge include forty of the mythological canvases from the Rubens commission, along with numerous Rubens oil sketches and drawings. Velazquez contributed several celebrated works intended for the pavilion, including hunting portraits of Philip IV, the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand of Austria, and Prince Balthasar Charles as a Hunter. His philosopher paintings of Aesop and Menippus, as well as his depiction of Mars, were also housed there. Additionally, Velazquez painted jester portraits for the lodge, such as The Jester Don John of Austria, The Jester Don Diego de Acedo, Portrait of Francisco Lezcano, and Portrait of Pablo de Valladolid. A 1806 travel book also noted the presence of paintings by Paul de Vos and Joris van Son. Most of the surviving canvases are currently held by the Museo Nacional del Prado, and in 2018 the most important pieces were grouped together in a room on the north attic of the museum following renovations.

The original sixteenth century structure was a rectangular, two story building with tower like corners and sloping slate roofs topped by tall spires known as chapiteles, characteristic of the Spanish Habsburg architectural style. It was surrounded by a perimeter wall resembling a fortress. Under the 1636 renovation by Juan Gomez de Mora, the building was transformed into a small palace pavilion using masonry and brick. The remodeled main building featured two main floors corresponding to the central core and an extension, plus two smaller floors in the tower itself. The ground floor contained an entrance hall, an oratory decorated by Vicente Carducho, four rooms, stables, kitchens, and service areas, with the central core housing a staircase and two windowless rooms. The first floor contained a distributor, a covered room where the king dined, and eight surrounding rooms including the west gallery and the east alcove, alongside another oratory and a privy.

The ruins of the Torre de la Parada are located in the Monte de El Pardo in Fuencarral-El Pardo, near the Royal Palace of El Pardo outside Madrid, Spain. The site is currently owned by the Spanish state, having passed through the ownership of monarchs including Philip IV, Charles II, Philip V, Louis I, Ferdinand VI, Charles III, and Charles IV. While the physical ruins remain at the original site, the artistic contents of the lodge can be viewed at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, which holds the majority of the surviving paintings. In 2024, the Museo de Belas Artes de Coruna inaugurated a virtual exhibition that allows visitors to experience an architectural and museographic reconstruction of the lodge as it appeared during its peak.