The Government Council has taken note at its meeting on Wednesday, April 9, of the management assignment to the Andalusian Institute of Historical Heritage (IAPH), under the Ministry of Culture and Sports, to carry out conservation, maintenance, and restoration work at the San Telmo Palace, the seat of the Andalusian Executive Presidency located in Seville.
The work to be carried out is related to both the sculptural ensemble of the illustrious Sevillians that tops the façade of the station, created by Antonio Susillo in the 19th century, as well as the facades of said palace located on Paseo de Roma and Calle Palos de la Frontera, as detailed in the Government Council’s reference.
As explained by the Junta, the restoration of the main entrance of Paseo de Roma focuses on the recovery of the formal, material, and stylistic aspects of the stone iconographic program, a project to which the IAPH will now add its technical capacity for the processing and technical supervision of the work’s execution.
The intervention on Antonio Susillo’s sculptures starts «from a rigorous phase of understanding the materiality of these sculptures and the rest of the ornamental elements of the same, with the aim of being accurate in their diagnosis and defining with the minimum margin of error the criteria and the proposed action,» as indicated by the Andalusian Government.
The Andalusian Executive emphasizes that the San Telmo Palace is a property «of undoubted heritage value,» protected as a Cultural Interest Asset (BIC), whose «conservation needs» require «the best resources to guarantee preservation in accordance with current legislation and the excellence expected from reference projects in good heritage practices throughout Andalusia.»
«It is precisely in this sense that the collaboration between the Ministry of the Presidency, Interior, Social Dialogue, and Administrative Simplification has been maintained for more than two decades with the Ministry of Culture and Sports through the IAPH,» as can be read in the Government Council’s reference.
The Junta adds that this collaboration has contributed to conservation work «with a multidisciplinary professionalism that has been endorsed in the successes» of the comprehensive rehabilitation project of the San Telmo Palace (2003), as well as in the material execution of the restoration of the chapel’s iconographic program (2004-2007) or its subsequent maintenance (2008-2025).
This model is «the reference point when facing the new conservation problems of the palace, especially those related to the ornamental and iconographic programs of the facades on Paseo de Roma and Calle Palos de la Frontera, which present new challenges for their conservation, and which until now had only been superficially addressed in the successive rehabilitation phases,» as also detailed by the Junta.
In addition to the collaboration with the IAPH, the Ministry of the Presidency, Interior, Social Dialogue, and Administrative Simplification has promoted the creation, by a multidisciplinary team, of a technical document called ‘Action Plan for the Preventive Conservation of Heritage Elements of the San Telmo Palace’ for the conservation work.
The purpose of this document is «to serve as a basis for the planning and organization of actions to be undertaken in terms of restoration, corrective conservation, and preventive conservation of the immovable heritage, which, except for the chapel, will analyze the state of all the elements and heritage spaces of greater interest that may require more specialized conservation, and which have supported the planning, prioritization, and implementation of actions undertaken in recent years.»
