The Palacio de los Argandoña, on the corner of Calle España and Calle Audiencia, is an ornate Belle Époque mansion built in the 1880s by the silver-tin baron Francisco Argandoña and his wife Clotilde, the same couple who built the Castillo de la Glorieta on the city's outskirts. Where the castle is a country folly, this is a town palace — three storeys of carved stonework, balconies with French ironwork, and a vast central staircase imported in pieces from Belgium.
Today the building houses a small bank and is mostly closed to the public, but the ground-floor lobby and patio can usually be entered during banking hours. The Argandoñas were childless and famous in their day for the orphans they raised; their portraits hang in several rooms. The palacio is one of the great surviving symbols of how rich late-19th-century Sucre once was before the political capital moved to La Paz and the silver ran out.