Guided visit to the Kexaa-Quejana Monumental Complex

The Kexaa-Quejana Monumental Complex stands in Ayala (Ayala/Aiara), at the centre of the Álava valley that bears the same name, set in a landscape of meadows and gentle hills. Declared a Listed Cultural Asset and owned by the Provincial Council of Álava since 2023, it is one of the best-preserved examples of civil and noble heritage in the Basque Country. The complex was built mainly in the second half of the fourteenth century by Fernán Pérez de Ayala and his son Pedro López de Ayala — the so-called Chancellor Ayala: poet, chronicler of four kings, diplomat and a forerunner of the Renaissance. It comprises a square fortified palace with two corner towers, a Dominican convent founded in 1378, the church of San Juan Bautista — with Baroque altarpieces and the tombs of the Chancellor's children — and the tower-chapel of the Virgin of the Cabello, built by the Chancellor himself in 1399 as his family's funerary chapel. Inside rest the alabaster tombs of Pedro López de Ayala and his wife Leonor de Guzmán. The guided visit takes in the complex through the lens of the Chancellor's life and the architecture he left behind, at a site that once stood at the crossroads of the trade routes linking the interior and the coast.