Burgos, like many other provincial capitals in Spain, is rich in old mansions of the nobility. Our English country towns have lost much historic and monumental interest from the immemorial practice of our aristocracy living on their estates, remote from towns. Quite small towns in France and in western Europe generally, usually contain two or three residences of the local nobility which do something to redeem the place from utter provincialism. It is the absence of such buildings perhaps that gives even our large country towns the aspect of mere agricultural centres or overgrown villages. The finest example of civil architecture in Burgos is the Casa del Cordon, now the residence of the Captain-General. This was the palace of that family whose tombs we have seen in the Capilla del Condestable. It was in all probability built by the same workmen in the middle of the fifteenth century, under the direction of the famous Mudejar architect of Segovia, Mohammed, and by order of the illustrious High Constable, Don Pedro Fernandez de Velasco, and his consort, Doña Mencia de Mendoza de la Vega. Here Ferdinand the Catholic and Charles V. held their courts, and here the first Duchess of Frias presided over a little coterie composed of the most brilliant men of letters and artists in Spain. This lady was the natural daughter of Ferdinand, her mother having been a Catalan girl who accompanied her royal lover in all his campaigns disguised as an esquire. The accomplished duchess was the firm friend of her half-sister, the hapless Queen Juana, and took the latter’s husband, Philip the Handsome, to task so severely, that he caused her to be ejected from her own house. Within these walls the Burgundian prince expired, his body being jealously watched by the queen and the duchess to save it, tradition avers, from a lady by whom he had been passionately loved and who had sworn to possess him in death. The Casa del Cordon has nobler memories, too, of Columbus who, on his return from his second voyage to America, here presented himself to the Catholic Sovereigns with offerings of the choicest products of the New World. Here was signed, on June 11, 1515, the act of the incorporation of the kingdom of Navarre with Castile, the unity of the whole of Spain being thus achieved. A copy of the document is preserved in the city archives. And in this house, in 1526, Francis I. was entertained on his way back to France by the High Constable of Castile.