Casa de las Chirimías

The House of the Chirimías (named after the musical wind instrument of the same name) is a building located in the Spanish municipality of the city of Granada, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, built by the Town Hall at the beginning of the 17th century, on land ceded by the Lords of Castril, next to the Darro River. It was a vantage point from which musicians performed and the personalities of the time watched the festivities on the Paseo de los Tristes, whose official street name is Paseo del Padre Manjón. The building was one of the first to introduce the baroque style.

In 2009, the project to convert the Casa de las Chirimías, coinciding with the four hundredth anniversary of its construction in 1609, into a carillon of automatons was proposed, according to a project request made by the Granada City Council and the provincial Tourist Plan, and is currently in the project tender phase.

For several years, it has been the headquarters of the Academia de Buenas Letras de Granada. In November 2006 it was declared an Andalusian Historical Heritage Site by the Andalusian Regional Government.

The Casa de las Chirimías stands on the side of the Paseo de los Tristes, next to the bridge of the same name which, according to Antonio Gallego Burín, may have been "the same bridge that the Arabs called Qantarat Ibn Raxitq, rebuilt in 1882".

The formalisation of the building corresponds to the use for which it was conceived: as a small temple for playing shawms and trumpets. It takes the form of a square tower, almost 25 square metres in area, with a ground floor and two storeys, delimited by a separating impost. Unfortunate interventions caused it to lose its free-standing character when a building was added to its west front. The exterior is made up of exposed brick walls with a fascia separating the floors. The most visible façade is the one facing the Paseo de los Tristes, although the main façade, where the entrance door is located, is the one facing Carrera del Darro. The third free-standing façade is on the north side, facing the Darro River and the Alhambra. The westernmost façade is the one that currently serves as a party wall.

The main façade is made up of symmetrically arranged regular openings. On the ground floor are the entrance door and a window in the form of semicircular arches. The first floor has two symmetrical lintelled balconies with metal railings. The first floor, on the four fronts of the façade, served as a belvedere, so the current balconies are the result of the original semicircular arches being blocked off. The spandrels of this second level on the Carrera del Darro façade are decorated with semi-circular chrome-plated scrolls in shades of green and framed by mouldings.

The roof, which rests on an entablature, is a wooden hipped roof with Arabic tiles; the edges are decorated with enamelled tiles alternating white and green.

The interior structure responds to the function for which the building was conceived: music hall, and the floors are therefore not subdivided. The space is marked by the rhythm imposed by the pilasters, which are visible, and the square is only broken in one corner by the staircase leading up.

Article obtained from Wikipedia article Wikipedia in his version of 11/08/2022, by various authors under the license Licencia de Documentación Libre GNU.