Teruel Cathedral

Overview

Teruel Cathedral, properly the church of Santa María de Mediavilla, is a brick building begun in 1171 whose three most important parts carry a UNESCO listing of their own: the bell tower of 1257, the lantern over the crossing finished in 1538, and a painted wooden ceiling roughly 32 metres long. The ceiling is why people come. It is not decoration hung below a roof, it is the roof, a tie-beam and collar timber frame that carries part of the central nave and is covered in painted kings, knights, craftsmen at work and invented animals.

By Spanish cathedral standards the building is modest: a rectangular plan, three naves, a straight ambulatory behind the high altar. At least five rounds of rebuilding left Romanesque foundations under Mudéjar brick, Gothic proportions and a Renaissance altarpiece, and the diocese is straightforward about the fact that almost nothing here was designed as a single scheme. Spain listed it as a national monument in 1931.

The tower is the part you can look at without a ticket. Its lower stage is pierced by a street, so pedestrians still walk under the bell chamber on their way through the old town, and the brickwork above them is set with green and white glazed ceramic and deeply splayed openings. Along with the tower of San Pedro it is one of the two oldest Mudéjar towers in the city, sober next to the fourteenth-century towers of San Martín and El Salvador and still showing Romanesque habits in its proportions.

History

Building started in 1171 on Romanesque lines, as a parish church dedicated to Santa María de Mediavilla. The bell tower went up in 1257 and 1258, brick, decorated with glazed green and white ceramic, with a street driven through its base from the start.

The remodelling that produced the building you walk into happened in the second half of the thirteenth century, under a Morisco master builder recorded as Juzaff, who raised the church and rebuilt it in Mudéjar brick. The timber ceiling belongs to that campaign, dated by the diocese to the second half of the thirteenth century and by the city tourism office to around 1300. Plasterwork and painting on the new apses were finished in 1335 under Yuçaf de Huzmel. The painted programme mixes geometric and plant patterns from Islamic tradition with heraldry and linear Gothic figure drawing, which is the whole point of the word Mudéjar: Muslim craftsmen, Christian client, one building.

Status followed. The parish was raised to a collegiate church in 1342, and in 1587, when the diocese of Teruel was created, a papal bull made it a cathedral.

The sixteenth century added height and light. A lantern over the crossing was designed in 1537 by Juan Lucas, known as Botero, and built the following year by the master Martín de Montalbán, an octagonal structure on squinches with Plateresque detail around its paired windows. The diocese describes it as a deliberate synthesis of Renaissance, Gothic and Mudéjar, which is a fair description of a Renaissance shape executed in Mudéjar brick.

Eighteenth-century taste nearly finished the ceiling off and instead saved it. A neoclassical false ceiling was fitted underneath the medieval timber, hiding it completely, which is precisely why the original paint survived in the condition it did. A restoration campaign in 1999 consolidated the frame and stabilised the paintings.

The most recent large addition is the one most visitors photograph first without realising how young it is. Pau Monguió rebuilt the south front in 1909 in neo-Mudéjar brick, and the city tourism office rates it as the finest neo-Mudéjar work by an architect better known locally for schools and modernist houses. Look at the brick coursing on that front and then at the tower a few metres away: the 1909 mason was copying the 1257 one, and mostly getting away with it.

Visiting

The tourist entrance is on Plaza Venerable Francés de Aranda, the square behind the building, where the Museo de Arte Sacro occupies the sixteenth-century Episcopal Palace. The official ticket office address is Plaza Venerable Francés de Aranda 3, 44001 Teruel.

Three tickets are sold, and the differences matter more than the prices. Entrada Museo is €6 and covers the sacred art museum only. Entrada Combinada Libre is €7 and covers the cathedral and the museum, but explicitly does not include going up to the ceiling. Entrada Combinada Guiada is €8, adds a guided visit of the cathedral, and is the only ticket that gets you up to the Mudéjar ceiling. Children under 7 go free but the ticket has to be picked up at the desk rather than booked online.

Every cathedral ticket is timed. On the booking calendar the free combined ticket runs at half-hourly slots, roughly 11:00 to 13:30 and 16:00 to 19:30 on a Saturday, while the guided visit on the same day ran at 11:30, 12:30, 17:30 and 18:30 only. Sundays start earlier, from 10:00, and then have a gap of about two hours in the late morning. The museum is not timed at all: entry is open between 11:00 and 14:00 and again from 16:00.

Inside, the sequence is short and the order barely matters, because the building is one rectangle with three naves and a straight ambulatory running behind the high altar. Start under the crossing, where the 1538 lantern drops daylight onto the altarpiece, then work back along the nave and look up. From the floor the ceiling reads as a dense band of pattern with figures buried in it; the guided route takes you up to the level where those figures become people carrying tools, riding horses and pulling faces.

The museum next door is worth the extra euro on the combined ticket rather than a separate trip. Its highlights, as the cathedral itself lists them, are works by Michel Sittow and an ivory Christ. Since the museum is open access within its hours, most people do the timed cathedral slot first and drift into the palace afterwards.

For anything the website does not answer, including whether a liturgy is going to close a slot, the cathedral takes calls on +34 978 618 016 and email at info@catedraldeteruel.es.

Tips

• Buy the €8 Entrada Combinada Guiada if you want the ceiling. The €7 ticket gets you into the same building but not up to the timber, and there is no upgrade at the door once you are inside.

• Guided slots are few. On the Saturday checked, the whole day offered four: 11:30, 12:30, 17:30 and 18:30. Look at the calendar before you fix the rest of your day around it.

• Sunday and holiday mornings are the worst bet. Worship runs 09:00 to 14:00 and tourist visiting is not permitted during it, which is why the Sunday calendar has a hole in the late morning.

• Winter afternoons end at 19:00 rather than 20:00, so a late plan that works in July fails in January.

• Children under 7 are free, but the free ticket is issued at the box office, not through the website, so arrive with a few minutes in hand.

• Walking under the bell tower costs nothing. The street through its base is a public thoroughfare, and it is the best place to see the glazed ceramic and splayed brick openings close up.

• Do the other three Mudéjar towers in the same walk. San Pedro is the oldest in Teruel, and San Martín, on Plaza Pérez Prado, and El Salvador are both fourteenth century and much more heavily decorated.

• Stand in Plaza de la Catedral before you go in, not after. The square holds the Casa del Deán, whose fountain dates from the sixteenth century, and the town hall, and it gives you the south front and the tower in one view.

• Pick your month. May, June, September and October are the comfortable ones; Teruel sits high and cold enough that winter mornings run below freezing.