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The Crooked House, the protagonist today in La Vanguardia’s Readers’ Photos, is a unique architectural reference in the historic center of the town of Saldaña, in Palencia.
It is estimated that it was built at the end of the 16th century and it was not built with this structure, but rather it was the action of water on its foundations that ended up giving it its current shape. The real miracle is that it remains standing.
Nowadays, it is also a restaurant, where they explain that “the age of the construction is estimated towards the end of the 16th and 17th centuries” and “it probably belonged to a butler or some nobleman of lower rank than the main nobleman of the area.”
The original construction technique is post and race, plastered and coated externally with lime. Currently, after the last restoration of the façade by La Escuela Taller de Saldaña, the original framework was left visible,
The water runoff from La Morterona, the area where the Castle of the Counts of Saldaña was located, a little above where the ruins of the current Doña Urraca Castle are located, passed around the church of San Pedro (Museum of the Roman Villa of La Olmeda), and going down the street, parallel to the facades of the houses until crashing head-on into the facade of the Casa Torcida to change its direction and continue its course towards the Plaza del Ayuntamiento.
In this way, “the continued action of water, in times when there were no collectors, nor did the pavement exist in the upper layer, caused the runoff to filter into the lower soil layers.”
Probably the composition of the soil is to a certain extent clayey, which causes it to behave like a plastic firm under the action of water, “which causes the settlement of the foundation, being detected more acutely in the first line of the façade, and in the point that is most perpendicular to the direction of the fall of rainwater.”
The resistance of the Crooked House is compared “to the root Castilians, hardy and fighters, bowed down by the action of time and history.”
