Palacio de los Reyes de Navarra
Most visitors walk straight past this 12th-century palace without realising it's one of the oldest and best-preserved civic Romanesque buildings in all of Spain — a royal residence that once hosted the kings of Navarre and now houses a small but rewarding museum dedicated to the painter Gustavo de Maeztu. The ground-floor arcade alone is worth five minutes of reverent staring.
The Architecture
Built in the late 12th century, the palace is a rare secular example of Romanesque architecture at this scale. The first-floor gallery of paired arched windows overlooking the street is the defining image — each column capital is carved with different figurative scenes, most famously a capital depicting Roland fighting the giant Ferragut, a scene from the Chanson de Roland set in Estella itself.
The building sits directly opposite the Iglesia de San Pedro de la Rúa, and the visual dialogue between the two Romanesque structures across the narrow street is one of the great architectural moments of the Camino.
The Gustavo de Maeztu Museum
The interior houses the Museo Gustavo de Maeztu, dedicated to the Basque-Navarrese painter (1887–1947) whose large-format figurative canvases fill the upper rooms with vivid colour and confident brushwork. His series on Navarrese rural life and mythology is particularly striking.
Admission is modest and the museum is rarely crowded, meaning you can spend genuine time with the paintings rather than shuffling past them. The combination of world-class Romanesque stonework and serious regional painting in one small building makes this Estella's most underrated stop.
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