The palace of the Forest and Grove of Heras: intervention of Manuel del Olmo in a property of the duke of Infantado

Manuel del Olmo was one of the main master masons of the Baroque period in Madrid, due to the protection of the Duke of Pastrana and Infantado. In 1678, he visited and writed several unpublished technical reports of works on buildings, allowing local master masons to present their offers.Throughout this report we will analyze the rural palace in the Forest and Grove of Heras. This is a unique source of information to understand how these places, nowadays destructed, were. The detailed technical description of the works to be done and the materials to be used, enables us to discover what the most common pathologies were, and perhaps the most significant point: how the interventions were carried out. It is unusual to find in similar documents an explanation of the aims of the intervention. However, the motivation for the work is deliberately pointed out: to recover the integrity and symbolic legibility of a palatine architecture.