Libro LCdP MARTINENA Ingles
3/5/11
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PĂĄgina 172
The curious detail might be added that on 27 December 1968 the Town Hall approved the purchase of the 78,886 square metres that made up the land of the glacis - the popular Vuelta del Castillo - for the sum of 3,272,308.10 pesetas. According to contemporary press reports, its market value would have fetched somewhere around 300 million. Ten years later, in December 1978, 5,500,000 pesetas were approved for levelling and laying out the Vuelta, including installation of benches and the sprinkler system for the grass. Another interesting item regarding the Citadel was Royal Decree 1424/86, dated 6 June, which abolished the Trust set up in 1964 following cession of the fortress to the Municipality. At the end of February 1987, the Frenchman François Baschet installed an original musical fountain in the small pond at the centre of the parade ground, at a cost of 1,200,000 pesetas. The parts were forged in Gerardo Brun's workshop. It consisted of 16 pairs of rotating metallic flowers of different heights, pushed round by the wind or jets of water from the pumps. Finely tuned balls and pipes hung from them and, when they knocked together, they made harmonious sounds. It did not last long. After being vandalised and repaired on two or three successive occasions, it was dismantled and withdrawn permanently. What perhaps ought to be done is to reconstruct the lovely fountain that used to exist. The original plan for it, drafted by Carlos Blondeaux in 1725, still survives.207 Around the same time, a work by NÊstor Basterrechea was put in one of the landscaped spaces, near the Weapons Room: a rustable steel sculpture, on a concrete pedestal. The piece was acquired by the Town Council for 5,000,000 pesetas, after having been exhibited on the occasion of the conference on Witchcraft and Occult Sciences, held in Pamplona in 1986. Mention must also be made of another matter, which although it never became a reality, also forms part of the recent history of the citadel, and that is the plan (207)
This plan shows the elevation, section and detail. The original is kept in the General Archive of Simancas and is reproduced on page 112 of this book.
172 / The Citadel of Pamplona. Five living centuries of an impregnable fortress