Villa Arbelaiz

By the 1890s the property was purchased by Tirso de Olazábal y Lardizábal, Count of Arbelaiz, and Graziela Zileri del Verme degli Obbizi, Duchess of Cadaval.

Olazábal, the Chief Deputy (Jefe Delegado) of Carlism in Vascongadas and Navarre between 1887 and 1913, had moved to Saint-Jean-de-Luz after the Carlist defeat in the Civil War, remaining there ever since and acquiring several properties in the province of Labourd.

The second level of the building was raised, the windows were enlarged and the roofs were decorated with pinnacles and finials as well as wooden lace skirts under the eaves of the gables, in the style of a Swiss chalet, as in many villas of the Belle Époque.

It included works attributed to Correggio, Carracci, van Dyck and Murillo, but also later acquisitions of paintings by Léon Bonnat, Eduardo Rosales, Santiago Arcos and Hubert-Denis Etcheverry.

[5] During the early 1900s, Villa Arbelaiz became a centre of social life, notorious for welcoming notable personalities associated with the legitimist movement as well as close friends and relatives of the Olazábal family.

[7] As his previous residences in the area, Villa Arbelaiz turned into a Carlist émigré headquarters and Olazábal kept the conspiratorial activity that years before had led the Liberal press to consider him one of the most insatiable and dangerous exiles.

[11] As Paris was upset with Olazábal’s public criticism of the republican secular education system,[12] in October 1910 he was ordered to move North of the Loire;[13] his duties were taken over by Urquijo, permitted to stay in the South.

In fact, Tirso de Olazábal had kept during his years of exile close relations with the Emperor Franz Joseph, with the Count of Caserta, with the Dukes in Bavaria and other personalities with political or family connections to the imperial circles.

[17] Olazábal was also a close friend of Robert of Parma - with whom he kept a regular correspondence over 30 years (particularly on hunting issues) - whose daughter, Zita, married in 1911 the Archduke Charles and became, in 1916, Empress consort of Austria.