Introduction

Abstract

Across the street from the Café-Bar Quintana in Loja, a mountain town on the western boundary of the Spanish province of Granada, stands an architectural eccentricity. Facing the cafe at the start of La Carrera (the Street of the Horse Race)¹ are two houses: one, a plain whitewashed, green-shuttered two-storey dwelling, typical of the nineteenth-century Andalucian middle class; the other, towering over and almost enveloping its neighbour, a massive ducal palace built in the 1860s in a neo-Renaissance style.² The modest two-storey dwelling was the home of Rafael Pérez del Alamo, veterinarian blacksmith, chief of the town’s Democrats and leader of the ‘Revolution of Loja’ of July 1861, considered by Republican historians as Spain’s first popular ‘Socialist’ uprising without the prompting of a military pronunciamiento (the accepted route to power in Liberal Spain).³ The ducal palace was home to General Ramón María Narváez, Duke of Valencia, warhorse of Spain’s moderado (Conservative) Liberal party and seven times First Minister between 1844 and 1868.⁴