"The weight of preserving all this is overwhelming to me," he says. First, there is the expense. Take the garden, for instance—an eighteenth-century French-style boxwood maze that costs a small fortune to maintain. Second, he does not want the house to be a living museum. "The twenty-first century is going to be tough for living museums," he says. "The goal is to preserve the house yet give it a current-day purpose. It must never lose its character and personality, but it still needs to be a comfortable home." How to accomplish this? The aristocracies of different European countries—those who have not yet sold off their palaces and the treasures within—have adopted different means of trying to preserve their estates. The British have maintained their castles and manors by turning them into hotels. The Italians have transformed theirs into rental villas. It would not be Spanish to turn one's home into someone else's lodging, says Legarda, but it is Spanish to have people over for dinner. Which explains my presence in his palace. I'm so grateful I got to see it. I just pray that 50 years from now, it will still be there, ready to welcome guests in search of a real taste of the region.