General view

At the beginning of the Baroque era in Spain, architectural innovations were restricted for the most part to religious buildings and civil structures played no significant role. One of the few exceptions to this was the residence and town at Lerma planned for Frencisco Sandoval y Royas, Philip III’s favourite, built by Juan G�mez de Mora together with his nephew Francisco de Mora, considered one of the best representatives of Herreran architecture. The ambitious prince had his palace built in the form of a four-wing structure with corner towers, modeled, on a reduced scale, on the royal Alc�zar in Madrid. This became the prototype for palace architecture in seventeenth-century Spain.