The Casa del Almirante is a Baroque merchant palace built in 1685 on Plaza de San Martín in El Pópulo, commissioned by Don Diego de Barrios, Admiral of the Fleet of the Indies (Flota de Indias). It is one of the primary surviving houses of the cargadores a Indias in Cádiz, distinguished by its red-and-white Genoese marble doorway and two early watchtowers (torres-miradores). Because the interior is temporarily closed while the palace undergoes conversion into a four-star hotel, a visit today is strictly an exterior stop on the square.
The Barrios family and the Indies trade
Don Diego de Barrios ordered the residence built in 1685 as an emblem of Baroque civil architecture at the height of Cádiz's growing role in the American fleets. Research cited in local press reports that the Barrios family came from Tavira in Portugal, where they had faced trouble with the Inquisition on suspicion of Jewish origins before rising through the transatlantic trade in Cádiz. Later modifications to the main façade were carried out by the admiral's son, Ignacio de Barrios.
Like the later palace beneath Torre Tavira, the house was designed as both a family seat and a working shipping headquarters. Its irregular four-storey plan is arranged around a central courtyard, with each level assigned a strict commercial or domestic rank:
- Ground floor: warehouse storage (almacén) for trade goods.
- Second floor (entresol): commercial counting house and offices (entreplanta).
- Main floor (planta noble): the principal apartments occupied by the Barrios family.
- Fourth floor: quarters for the household servants.
Plan for an exterior stop only
The interior is closed for ongoing hotel conversion works and has no visiting hours. Allow five to ten minutes on Plaza de San Martín to inspect the Genoese marble portal and oyster-stone walls from the square.
The Genoese marble portal and exterior
What you can examine directly from Plaza de San Martín is the two-tiered Baroque doorway carved in Genoese red marble and white marble imported from Italy. It was produced in the Andreoli workshop and assembled on site by the master builder García Narváez.
The lower tier frames the entrance with four paired columns of the Tuscan order set at an angle, while the upper tier flanks the central balcony with twisted Solomonic columns beneath a curved pediment carrying the Barrios family coat of arms. Across the broader three-section elevation, the first and second levels and the third-floor corners are built of exposed local oyster-stone (piedra ostionera), with the remaining wall surfaces rendered and painted in red ochre (color almagra). Two watchtowers (torres de vigilancia) crown the roofline and rank among the oldest surviving lookout towers in the quarter.
Behind the closed street doors, the rectangular patio rests on semicircular arches over Tuscan columns of Genoese red marble and holds two octagonal white-marble wellheads carved with mask reliefs. To the left rises a two-flight marble staircase with a turned mahogany balustrade, covered by an oval dome on pendentives with plasterwork ribs converging on a central boss.
From tenements to hotel rehabilitation
After serving for generations as a single-family house, the palace was subdivided during the 20th century into multiple tenements (viviendas), which deteriorated until the building was shut. The Junta de Andalucía declared it a Bien de Interés Cultural (Monumento) in May 2005 (code RI-51-0005399-00000).
An initial hotel conversion project stalled in 2010, and the Catalan hotel group Hotusa bought the property from BBVA in 2017. In late 2024, after securing municipal building approval, Hotusa resumed works to turn the palace into a four-star hotel with 38 rooms.
Viewing the palace on Plaza de San Martín
Because the interior remains closed, treat Plaza de San Martín, 3 as a five-minute architectural stop inside the medieval lanes of the Barrio del Pópulo. It sits a short walk from the Iglesia de Santa Cruz (the Old Cathedral) and the Roman Theatre, making it easy to pair all three on foot before continuing east to Plaza de San Juan de Dios, south to the Casa de Iberoamérica, or north toward Barrio de San Carlos.