Toledo has plenty of medieval religious buildings and almost no medieval domestic ones you can walk into. This is the exception, and the official description does not hedge: the museum “occupies part of a principal house of the Toledan nobility of the fourteenth century and constitutes the best example of palace architecture of the period”.
The house was built for Lope González Palomeque and María Téllez de Meneses, and it follows an Andalusi palace plan — the layout a wealthy household in Muslim Spain would have used, put up for Christian nobles a couple of centuries after the conquest of the city. The surfaces are the point: carved plaster yeserías across the walls and a timber roof structure above them. Both have been conserved as state heritage work — the plasterwork by the Spanish Historical Heritage Institute in 2004, the plaster and framework cleaned again in 2012.
The name is a red herring worth knowing about. Taller del Moro means “the Moor’s workshop”, and it is traditionally explained by a much later use of the building as a masons’ yard for work on the cathedral, not by anybody who lived here.
It opened as a museum in 1963, closed in the early 2000s, and reopened in 2017 after some fifteen years of rehabilitation, now presented as an interpretation centre for Mudéjar art with a small, deliberately chosen selection of Andalusi decorative arts from Toledo. The pieces are there to explain the room rather than the other way round, which is the right decision in a building like this.
Practically: it is on Calle Taller del Moro beside the Palacio de Fuensalida, seat of the regional government, a couple of minutes from Santo Tomé and the Museo del Greco. Admission is currently free. The hours are split by a two-hour closure at lunch and it shuts on Mondays, which is how a free, first-rate fourteenth-century interior stays empty in one of the most visited small cities in Spain.
