Abstract
The Convent-Hospital of San José was founded by Don Fernando de Alcaraz in 1634. The Hospitaller Fathers of San Juan de Dios attended to male patients, from the most disadvantaged classes of Alcalá de Henares.
There are three construction phases, in the first of them the conventual building was raised, the scarcity of economic resources generated a building with little monumentality. We do not know the name of the seventeenth century tracist.
The second building period consisted in building a new main chapel, as Fray Juan Santos, chronicler of the Order, tells us; its construction took place before 1715.
Father Liminiana, General of the Order since 1781, created a College for Young Religious Hospitallers in Alcalá de Henares. Our research work reveals that Jacinto Medranda, a Murcian architect, carried out work in 1782 inside the building, most likely linked to that foundation, which we must consider as the third and last stage of construction.
We also carried out the study of the movable heritage of the Convent-Hospital-School, unifying documentary data from the War of Independence (1808-1814), an inventory of its cultural heritage in 1833, a pictorial list of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando de Madrid (after 1835), as well as news of the alcalaíno chronicler Acosta de la Torre (1882). It is unfortunate but nothing is preserved of such interesting cultural assets, the only thing that has arrived is the portal and the wall of the gospel of the temple, as well as most of the convent, transformed into houses, hence the legacy of the Hospitallers passes, today, totally unnoticed.