The Palace of La Merced, the former convent of La Merced Calzada, is the headquarters of the Provincial Council of Cordoba. The former convent of Nuestra Señora la Merced has been declared an Asset of Cultural Interest in the category of Monument since 2008.

Traditionally, the origin and foundation of this convent is linked to the figure of Saint Peter Nolasco, to whom King Ferdinand III of Castile donated the basilica of Santa Eulalia after the conquest of the city. No remains of the convent built in the 13th century have been preserved, although it is known that it is located in the same place where it was founded. Witness to the splendour of the institution in these centuries is the Cristo de la Merced, an important piece from the end of the 14th century, related to the Castilian crucifixes. The navigator Christopher Columbus lived in the old convent during the years he spent in Cordoba waiting to meet the Catholic Monarchs.

The current building dates from the 18th century, and the authors who were involved in the structuring of the complex are still unknown. However, it can be said that there were two phases in its construction. The first corresponds to the beginning of the 18th century, when the entire northern wing was built, i.e. the secondary cloister and adjoining rooms. Of these, only the courtyard and the staircase have been preserved. The latter was financed by Cardinal Salazar and was built by Francisco Hurtado Izquierdo. Its design is closely related to the secondary staircase that the aforementioned master built in those years for Cardinal Salazar's hospital.

In a second stage, the construction of the church, the main cloister, the staircase and the outbuildings surrounding it was undertaken. The exterior façade of the convent was also transformed, giving the complex greater unity and unity. It thus consists of a large, beautifully assembled rectangle in which the horizontality of the main façade is broken by the verticality of the church.

The work was carried out between 1716 and 1760, under the patronage of Fray Pedro de Anguita, Fray Pedro González and Fray Lorenzo García Ramírez. The masters who carried out the work are unknown, although the collaboration of the brothers Francisco and Juan Aguilar del Río Arriaza, Tomás Jerónimo Pedrajas and Alonso Gómez de Sandoval is not ruled out.

Due to the Spanish Disentailment, and after a refurbishment in 1850, it was used as a hospice. During Antonio Cruz-Conde's presidency of the Cordoba Provincial Council, it was decided to move the hospice and adapt it as the headquarters of the Provincial Council in 1960, acquiring its current appearance under the direction of the architect Rafael de la Hoz Arderius.

In the early hours of 29 January 1978, the church suffered a huge fire caused by Miguel López Toledano, a former hospice worker, which destroyed the main altarpiece and all the items that adorned it, as well as the theft of more than 100,000 pesetas from the palace's printing press, which were recovered after his arrest. The restoration cost more than 10 million euros, and its inauguration was celebrated in December 2014 in the presence of the president María Luisa Ceballos, after thirty-six years of work.

The church was built between 1716 and 1745. It is located in the centre of the complex and serves as the dividing axis between the two cloisters that articulate the building, the link between them being the gallery that runs around the head of the church.

On the outside, the façade is structured into three streets by means of pilasters that separate the central part from the lateral ones, which are topped by belfries. The central street coincides with the development of the main nave of the church; it is made up of three sections on which rests a triangular pediment crowned by the figure of San Rafael. In the centre is the church doorway, in white stone, with great movement in the cornices and supports, with a niche in the second section with the stone image of Nuestra Señora de la Merced (Our Lady of Mercy).

The church has a Latin cross plan inscribed in a rectangle. It has a flat chevet - flanked by sacristies - with transepts and a transept. Above the former arches, along the arms of the cross, there are tribunes. The central nave is covered with a barrel vault with lunettes and the transept arms are covered with quarter spheres divided into three sections. The tectonic elements are decorated with polychrome medallions, with half-relief busts of the saints and blessed of the Mercedarian order framed by rich plasterwork. It has a very large choir loft whose parapet is incurved to incorporate the organ tribunes, unfortunately lost. The choir stalls were adorned with a half-point mural painting depicting the Apparition of Saint Raphael to Blessed Simón de Sousa by José Ignacio de Cobo y Guzmán.

Around 1770, Alonso Gómez de Sandoval was commissioned to build the main altarpiece, which unfortunately disappeared in the violent fire of 1978 and was rebuilt in 2014. The side altars of Santa María del Socorro and Santa Mariana, both made in stucco and also related to Gómez de Sandoval, are from the same period, although they have been extensively restored. The Hermandad de la Quinta Angustia brotherhood and the Grupo de Fieles de la Soledad de Nuestra Señora (Group of the Faithful of the Solitude of Our Lady) reside here.

Once the church was completed, the main cloister must have been built, which was finished around 1752. It has a quadrangular floor plan and is made up of two floors; the ground floor is porticoed and has semicircular arches on pairs of Tuscan columns. The first floor is closed and has pilasters, ornamented with panels, and balconies in the spaces in between. In the centre is a large black marble fountain. The whole building is profusely decorated, with the cornice with pinjantes and the painting that covers the ornamental elements, which reinforces its Baroque aesthetics.

The staircase that starts in the southern bay of the courtyard and connects the two floors of the building was also built around this time. It is an imperial staircase with a quadrangular casing. It has a simple, centred first flight, which is divided into two parallel sides from a landing, thus completing the quadrature of the floor plan. It is made with marble of different colours, inlaid and inlaid with inlay, resulting in a work of great elegance, related to Gómez de Sandoval for its aesthetics. It is covered with a hemispherical dome decorated with polychrome reliefs depicting scenes from the life of Saint Peter Nolasco.

The exterior of the convent building has undergone various alterations over time, with the eastern façade being the one that has best preserved its original form. The northern side, although showing the same formal characteristics as the main front, shows the incorporation of new elements, such as the stone doorway that comes from the porter's lodge of San Pedro de Alcántara, a 16th century work, placed there in the 1960s at the express wish of the corporation's architect Rafael de la Hoz and designed by the Cordovan painter Miguel Del Moral. The south façade was created at that time and is decorated with a large sundial, the work of the same architect. Currently (2007) work is being carried out on the church to restore it to the splendour it had in the 18th century, which was lost in 1978. The main altarpiece is being copied from photos and the burnt images have been restored.

This institution houses a number of works of art from different periods. The oldest ones come mostly from the convent; others have arrived as proof of the scholarships of artists who have received a grant from the corporation. Finally, there is another group of works that come from the competitions and exhibitions sponsored by the provincial council; hence, alongside mediocre works by local artists, there are also creations by outstanding masters of the national contemporary scene, such as Miguel Del Moral, Pedro Bueno, Emilio Serrano, Manchu Gal, María Antonia Dans, Luis García Ochoa, Antonio Zarco and José Duarte.

Among the oldest pieces are a beautiful guild cup, probably a Flemish work from the 16th century, and the series of paintings on the life of Saint Peter Nolasco, painted by José Ignacio de Cobo y Guzmán in the first half of the 18th century. Some of these canvases belong to the Museum of Fine Arts and are on deposit here. There are also a good number of anonymous works of sculpture and painting. Among the former is the group of Saint Anne and the Virgin, from the first third of the 18th century.

The 19th century includes an interesting group of pictorial works by the various artists who were granted a scholarship by the Diputación to study painting. These include Alfredo Lobato, Adolfo Lozano Sidro, Joaquín Martínez de la Vega - who in 1865 painted the enormous canvas Los ermitaños de Belén dando de comer a los pobres - José Muñoz Contreras, Agustín del Pino, Rafael Romero de Torres and Tomás Muñoz Lucena, to whom we owe Plegaria en las Ermitas, a work that won the first medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in 1901.

In the field of sculpture, the creations of Mateo Inurria Lainosa stand out, including Allegory of Cordoba (1888) and Matter in Triumph (1889), one of his most important creations. The collection of engravings and lithographs of the city's main monuments by famous artists such as David Roberts, among others, is very interesting.

Twentieth century painting is represented by a good number of local and foreign artists whose works reflect the multiple trends in the art of our time. Among the former, who are undoubtedly the most numerous, are Ángel Díaz Huertas, Ángel López-Obrero, Pedro Bueno, Rafael Botí, Miguel del Moral, Rafael Serrano, Teresa García Courtoy and Julia Hidalgo.