Seville Cathedral

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Seville Cathedral — formally the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the See — is the great late-Gothic church of Seville in southern Spain, by most measures the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. It was built between roughly 1402 and 1517, directly upon the foundations of the Almohad congregational mosque that had stood there since the twelfth century, when the city was the seat of a Muslim dynasty. The chapter that commissioned it is said to have resolved to raise a church so vast that posterity would think them mad. The building is a record of one religion overwriting another on the same ground, and of how much of the older fabric the newer chose to keep.

Two elements of the mosque survive inside the Christian complex. The first is the Patio de los Naranjos, the courtyard of orange trees where the faithful once performed ablutions before prayer. The second, and more striking, is the Giralda: the mosque’s brick minaret, a masterwork of Almohad architecture, left standing and converted into the cathedral’s bell-tower, with a Renaissance belfry added at its summit in the sixteenth century. A bronze weathervane in the form of Faith — el Giraldillo — turns above it and gives the tower its name. The minaret that once called Muslims to prayer thus carries Christian bells, an inheritance the cathedral neither hid nor erased.

The interior holds the works that drew the city’s wealth in the age of the Indies — wealth that came from the conquest of the Americas and the colonial trade Seville monopolised: a colossal carved and gilded altarpiece, the choir, and the tombs of Castilian kings. Among the monuments is a raised sepulchre traditionally identified as the tomb of Christopher Columbus, borne by four allegorical figures of the kingdoms of Spain; the claim has long been disputed, since his remains were moved repeatedly across the Atlantic, though genetic testing has supported the identification of bones interred here. The cathedral, the Giralda, and the neighbouring Alcázar are together inscribed as a World Heritage site.

For the study of layered sacred ground, Seville is a clear case. The cathedral does not stand near a former mosque but on top of one, reusing its courtyard and its tower; the site has been a place of organised worship, Muslim and then Christian, for the better part of a thousand years. What changed was the name of the god addressed there. The stones, in large part, did not.

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