Zamora Headquarters

Located in the old convent of San Francisco restored by the architect Manuel de las Casas, it integrates a functionally effective complex by combining the old stone factory with the glass and steel of the coating that dominates the current intervention. In an area of 8000m² (3500m² built) the complex houses the following spaces: Assembly Room, Videoconference Room (Escalante Chapel) Meeting Room (Ocampo Chapel), Exhibition Room (Rector Chapel), Documentation Centre, Cafeteria, Private Area and Residential Area.

Video of the Foundation's facilities

This place where Castilian communards used to gather also served as barracks for French troops, who caused irreparable damage to its structure.

The final exclusion of the convent took place in the 1930s.

The building has two very different areas: the historical architectural part and the new construction part.

The historic part is limited to the architectural vestiges of the convent church: apse of the 16th century, lateral chapels of Ocampo and Escalante of the late 15th and early 16th century and the funerary chapel (Dean's Chapel) of Gil de Hontañón, with a small interior chapel of the early 16th century. Likewise, there are traces of the old cloister and the old cellar, dating from the early 17th century.
The newly built area is a splendid example of new Spanish architecture. Newly created spaces clad in corten steel have been installed, where the refectory, classrooms, residence and library are located.

"The proposal for the creation of the King Afonso Henriques Foundation in this set of Gothic vestiges is simple: to enhance that mysterious beauty of incompleteness that evokes past times of the undoubted plastic capacity of the ruin, and articulates, with light volumes, a sequence of spaces that respond to a program This idea, together with the mark of what was the conventual complex, the privileged views over the river and the city of Zamora lead to the solution adopted: "an L-shaped building , which delimits the former void of the Church, and which divides the space into two: a public garden, which was previously occupied by three naves of the Church, and another which occupies the place of the first cloister of the former convent complex ".

(Manuel de las Casas)