5. Ca n'Olesa: archetypical image for the twentieth-century tourism.

©Text i fotos: Àngel Gené i Ramis; traducció a l'anglès: Montserrat Casanovas i Stobart; suport informàtic: Martí Gené i Ramis

Author:
Unknown (first floor windows decorations seem inspired by the work of Juan Salas in the choir of the Cathedral.

Period and style:
14th and 15th centuries (Gothic remnants) 16th (facade, Renaissance), 17th century (patio, Baroque)
Formal analysis (descriptions):
Mansion from the city of Palma with its typical features: Main door with round arch., Baroque Patio and porch with eaves on the Gothic roof and little windows with ogee arches in imitation of the "Llonja", the old fish market.

It has Renaissance windows on the ground and first floors, Gothic forms on the porch with ogee arches at the top.
The spaciousness of the asymmetric patio, excessive thick columns and the three-centered arches extraordinarily low show the ostentation, arrogance, creativity and freedom of canon characteristic of the Baroque art.
Commentary:
Nearly every noble house in Palma, like this one, has Gothic origins, often as a result of joining smaller houses, with alterations from the sixteenth-century Renaissance (above all in the windows and patio).
This type of aristocratic house was defined by the novelist Llorenç Villalonga in the first third of the 20th century in his novel "Mort de Dama" (its female protagonist quickly defines this kind of house to us when she says: "Only in proper houses there is raining"). The author himself lived in a house like this one close to the Cathedral. During the Civil War, Villalonga wrote his most popular and well-known novel "Bearn".
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the patio has become the most representative touristic image of Palma (The city has been named as a "city of patis").