The Arab Baths Cultural Center. The Villardompardo Palace is located in the Palace of the First Count of Villardompardo and Viceroy of Peru, Sir Fernando de Torres y Portugal, a Renaissance building from the 16th century.

Built in the 11th century, the Arab Baths of Jaén are located in the basements of the Palace and their extension makes them probably the largest visitable baths in Spain.

At the end of the 16th century the Count of Villardompardo built his Palace on the Baths, pwhile art of them kept hidden between the foundations and basements, remaining in this way during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Juan Eslava Galán makes continuous mention of both spaces in The Templars and the Table of Solomon.

(…) In the center of the Magdalena neighborhood, surrounded by the initiation places of the old matriarchal sanctuary, in front of the palace of the Counts of Villardompardo, scions of the Torres family, in whose basements you can visit the Arab baths where the Moorish king died(…)

The Templars and the Table of Solomon. Chapter 27.

In the same building that makes up the Villardompardo palace there are also the International Naïf Art Museum “Manuel Moral”, the first and only one in Spain specialized in this art, and the Museum of Popular Arts and Customs of Jaén.

In the square in front of the palace, there is also an element that Juan Eslava Galán considers of great interest in his research on the Templars: the duck fountain.

(…) in the Plaza de Santa Luisa de Marillac (…). In the center, emerging from the still water, an octagonal pillar (so frequent in Templar and Calatrava construction) supports a hemisphere (the stone of the Mother Goddess) on which a goose stands with its webbed legs extended over the stone. (…). Let us not forget that the goose is one of the main symbols of the matriarchal cults of the sanctuary (…)

The Templars and the Table of Solomon. Chapter 26.