Hospital San Juan de Dios

The Hospital founded by San Juan de Dios had several seats. The first of them was located at Lucena Street. Eventually, it was set in this place, within San Jeronimo Monastery lands. In the Confiscation of Mendizabal in 1835, it became the property of the County, but later turned back into the ownership of the Hospital Order.

The hospital was built between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thanks to the generosity of Archbishop Pedro Guerrero, the help of the people of Granada and Diego de Siloe, that left all his property under a will.

The courtyards

It has two courtyards decorated with tiles and murals. The main cloister has a rectangular plan and consists of two floors with galleries on both sides and a fountain in the center. Pavement is made of Sierra Elvira stone floor tiles.

The lower gallery has rounded molded arches with a cartouche in the center of the same arch, all supported on Tuscan columns. In the spandrels, or spaces between each of the central arches of the four bays, there are roundels with the crest of the charitable Order.

The upper floor is set as the lower one, but its arches are elliptical and have a balustrade. Both are covered by wood coffering or alfarje. Its walls are decorated with oil and tempera by Diego Sanchez Sarabia and Tomas Ferrer, made in the eighteenth century. The ground floor units were dedicated to religious use and the upper one was used for the care of the sick.

The facade was done by the mason Cristobal de Vilchez in 1609 with Macael and Sierra Elvira marble. In the first body, we can find the access door framed within a rounded arch flanked by two pairs of Dorian columns. The second one is presided by a niche with the sculpture of San Juan de Dios. It is surmounted by a divided pediment where the crest of the Order is situated.