Casa Maestre, Cartagena
The mansion that announced Modernismo in Cartagena, a mining magnate’s palace on the city’s liveliest square.
At a glance
Casa Maestre faces the Plaza de San Francisco, one of the busiest squares of Cartagena, and it marks the moment the Modernista language arrived in the city in full. The project, dated 1906, was drawn up by the architect Marceliano Coquillat with Víctor Beltrí, the figure who would dominate the city’s building boom. The client was José Maestre Pérez, a magnate and politician who owned mines in the Cartagena–La Unión sierra. He wanted a home that looked outward to Barcelona, and the architects gave him one. Since 2021 the building has been listed as a Bien de Interés Cultural.
Key facts
- Location: Plaza de San Francisco 5, Cartagena
- Architects: Marceliano Coquillat, with Víctor Beltrí
- Built: from the 1906 project
- Style: Spanish Modernismo
- Today: a bank branch (Banco Santander); listed BIC since 2021
History
Cartagena grew rich at the turn of the twentieth century on lead, silver and zinc from the mines that ring the city. The men who controlled that wealth built mansions to match, and the most ambitious of them turned to Modernismo, the new Catalan manner spreading south from Barcelona. José Maestre Pérez, owner of mining concessions in the sierra, commissioned the architect Marceliano Coquillat to raise him a house on the Plaza de San Francisco.
The result, with Víctor Beltrí also at work on the design, is generally taken as the building that made Modernismo the dominant style of early-century Cartagena. Its ornament drew directly on the Barcelona architecture of the day, and in turn it set the tone for the local Modernista language that Beltrí would carry through the city in the years that followed.
The house has long since left private hands and now serves as a bank, but its façade survives intact, and in 2021 it received the protection of a Bien de Interés Cultural listing.
What you see
The corner of the building is its showpiece. Bay windows and balconies are stacked up the angle and crowned with a flourish, so the house turns the junction of square and street into a piece of theatre. Carved stone, ironwork and modelled plaster crowd the openings with floral Modernista ornament.
Where Gaudí broke the rules, Cartagena’s Modernismo kept the discipline of a classical façade and poured its invention into the surface. Casa Maestre reads as an ordered, grand front dressed in the flowers, curves and whiplash lines of the new century, the calling card of a man who wanted his city to look modern.
Practical information
- Open: exterior viewable from the square; interior is a working bank
- Cost: free to view the façade
- Best for: the ornamented corner above the Plaza de San Francisco
- Time needed: 10–15 minutes
Getting there
The Plaza de San Francisco is in the heart of old Cartagena, a few minutes’ walk from the Calle Mayor, the Roman Theatre and the port.
Nearby
- Gran Hotel de Cartagena — Beltrí’s great Modernista landmark nearby
- Casa Cervantes — another Modernista mansion on the Calle Mayor
- Palacio de Aguirre — Beltrí’s tiled corner palace
Sources
- Región de Murcia Digital (regmurcia.com) — Casa Maestre
- Ayuntamiento de Cartagena — Modernismo and the BIC listing
- Wikimedia Commons — image source and licence
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