English Translation
The palace has a tall tower.
According to Google Ngrams, “una alta torre” is indeed the more popular word order. I assume it’s because towers are supposed to be high.
una alta torre 0.0000023669%
una torre alta 0.0000011789%
I’d say “una alta torre” is a bit more literary, so it checks out that Ngrams reports it to be more frequent.
It also feels a bit different. Maybe you’d use " una alta torre", if the length of the tower is an implicit characteristic (is a “hightower” a thing in english, or am I getting influenced by GoT?), and “una torre alta”, if you meant that the palace had a tower, which just so happened to be tall.
- El palacio tiene una alta torre de planta rectangular → The tower is of the tall kind, it’s a given, and what is important is that it is rectangular
- El palacio tiene una torre alta, de planta rectangular → the fact that it is tall is equally important as that it is rectangular. Perhaps used if you want to compare it to the smaller, round one: “… y otra más pequeña, de planta circular”
Here’s what the RAE has to say about adjective position. I think this sentence might fall in the case discussed in paragraph 13.m
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