The work of Juan de Badajoz is to be seen in the Sacristy, a spacious nave of three vaults, richly designed and gilded. Under the windows are medallions with busts in relief, very well done. The retablo in the plateresque style shows the Eternal Father with His angels, and the Vision of Santiago. The inscriptions on the frieze are from the Book of Leviticus. Much good work is to be seen in the cloisters, begun in the Armada year or thereabouts, but interest here chiefly centres in the Prior’s apartments where the illustrious Quevedo was imprisoned by order of the Count-Duke Olivares, from December 1639 to June 1643,--the penalty for an all too true and biting lampoon. Quevedo thus describes his prison in one of the letters to his friend Adán de la Parra:-- ‘Although at first I was imprisoned in a tower of this sacred house, as roomy as it was light and warm for this season of the year, a short time after by superior order (I will not say by superior disorder) I was taken to another much more uncomfortable one, where I am now. It is an underground room, as damp as a spring, so dark that in it it is always night, and so cold that it is always like January. It is undoubtedly more like a tomb than a prison.... The latitude of this tomb, in which I am enclosed, is barely twenty-four feet and the width nineteen. The roof and walls are in many places fallen owing to the damp, and everything is so black that it seems more like a hiding-place of fugitive thieves than the prison of a man of honour. In order to enter it two equally strong doors have to be passed; one is on the floor of the convent and the other on the floor of my prison, after twenty-seven steps designed like a precipice.... This is the life to which I am doomed by him who, because I would not be his favourite, is now my enemy.’ The grand façade of the old convent, extending to the river bank, is divided into two stories, the lower characterised by semicircular windows between pilasters in the plateresque style, and separated by niches; the upper by rectangular windows with balconies, disposed between columns, and likewise separated by niches in pairs. The frieze beneath the lower row of windows is adorned by a series of medallions, displaying the heads of mythological and historical worthies, Gentiles and Christians, ancients and moderns, most oddly assorted. With Priam and Hector, Hannibal and Cæsar, we find Charlemagne and the Cid, Charles V. and Philip II., with Lucretia, Judith and Isabel the Catholic. The busts to the left of the doorway are those of the grand masters of the Order of Santiago. The doorway itself is a very unhappy combination of the plateresque and baroque styles, but the statue of Fame surmounting it is not devoid of grace and dignity. The balconies and windows facing the river date from the eighteenth century.