Ávila Cathedral

Overview

Ávila Cathedral is a late 12th-century fortress-church whose apse stands in the line of the city’s medieval wall as one of its turrets. Work began around 1170 on the site of an earlier Romanesque church dedicated to El Salvador, and carried on for more than three hundred years.

The head of the building came first, designed by Maestro Fruchel as a double ambulatory ringed by nine semicircular chapels, and it was set straight into the rampart like an extra tower. That is where the cathedral’s nickname Fortior Abulensis comes from. After Fruchel died the plan shrank from five naves to three and switched from late Romanesque to French Gothic, which is why the cathedral’s own history calls it the first Gothic cathedral in Castile, ahead of Burgos and León.

The finished building runs 85 metres long and 42.5 metres wide, with a central nave 28 metres high and only 10 metres across. That narrow, tall proportion is the point: from the street the place reads as military masonry, and the lightness only arrives once you are inside and looking up.

Come for three things above all: the Trasaltar, a stone screen by Vasco de la Zarza wrapped around the back of the sanctuary, the high altarpiece begun by Pedro Berruguete, and the museum in the Capilla del Cardenal, where an El Greco portrait hangs over a tomb and a six-storey silver monstrance holds the middle of the room.

History

The see traces itself to San Segundo, by tradition the first bishop, sent to the Iberian Peninsula in AD 63. That is legend rather than record, but it explains why so much of the building’s later money went on housing his relics. What is documented starts after Alfonso VI took the territory back in the late 11th century and handed the repopulation of Ávila to his son-in-law Raimundo de Borgoña, who raised the walls and the first church of El Salvador on this spot.

Around 1170 the present building went up over that church, head first. The girola is still the most primitive part of the cathedral and the part with the most architectural weight, and the original capitals from that first campaign survive, carved with Lazarus and the rich man, the Fall, and a menagerie of invented animals.

A third phase ran from the end of the 13th century to the middle of the 14th, pushed mainly by bishop Sancho Blázquez Dávila. The transept was reworked, the cloister and sacristies were built, and the upper walls of the central nave were closed and propped on flying buttresses over heavy piers. The right-hand tower of the façade was left unfinished for want of money, and it is still unfinished.

The last big changes came between about 1470 and the mid 16th century. The west portal was moved bodily to the north side and a new entrance built in the space it left, work carried out by the Flemish-descended architect Juan Guas, who squeezed the older doorway into a bay smaller than the one it came from. A new choir then went up in the middle of the nave to separate it from the high altar, and the Romanesque tribune over the ambulatory was pulled down to let light into the east end.

In 1594 bishop Jerónimo Manrique de Lara asked for San Segundo’s relics to be brought from a Romanesque hermitage by the river Adaja into the cathedral, and Francisco de Mora began a chapel for them; the relics were installed in an urn in 1615. The following year, 1595, the outside of the chevet was armoured in granite.

Damage arrived from an unexpected direction in 1755, when the Lisbon earthquake destroyed several of the windows and the openings along the central nave were bricked up. They stayed shut until a recovery campaign from the mid 20th century reopened them, glazed them with pale geometric panes and restored what had survived. The state had already declared the cathedral a Historic-Artistic Monument on 31 October 1914.

Conservation is now partly automated. Since 2017 the Smart Heritage City project has installed 226 sensors along the wall, around the cathedral and on other buildings and streets, reading humidity, temperature, light, cracks, insects and traffic vibration, with the deterioration of one of the Gothic cathedral’s façades among the things they are meant to explain. The building also kept taking burials into this century: Adolfo Suárez, who died on 23 March 2014, lies in the cloister beside his wife Amparo Illana, and the historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz rests there too.

Visiting

The entrance is at Plaza de la Catedral 8. The cathedral opens Monday to Saturday 10:00 to 20:00 and Sunday 12:30 to 20:00, with last access 30 minutes before closing, and general admission is €10. One ticket covers the church, the girola chapels, the sacristy, the museum and the cloister, and both the audioguide and a virtual reality sequence are included in the price. Buy on the spot or through the official ticket page.

Go in through the north door before you buy anything, because the doorway is the best sculpture on the exterior. Known as the Puerta de los Apóstoles, it dates from around 1300 and stood between the two western towers until Juan Guas moved it. The tympanum carries the Last Judgement, with Christ in a mandorla and censing angels on two levels, the apostles stand in the jambs on their bases and under canopies, and five archivolts run through the resurrection of the dead, the damnation of sinners and the Elders of the Apocalypse.

Inside, the route runs up the nave to the choir. The stalls were begun in 1536 and took eleven years, worked in walnut to designs by Cornelius de Holanda with Juan Rodríguez and Lucas Giraldo on the job; the lower backs carry saints’ lives in half relief, the upper tier grotesques and apostles, and a polychrome San Segundo sits over the bishop’s seat. Walk round to the trascoro, the outer casing, for three Renaissance reliefs: the Presentation in the Temple, the Adoration of the Kings and the Massacre of the Innocents.

The high altarpiece is a relay of three painters. Pedro Berruguete started it in 1499 and got as far as the predella and two Passion panels before he died in 1503; Santa Cruz carried on and died in 1508; Juan de Borgoña closed the cycle in 1512. Vasco de la Zarza finished its gilded frame in 1508 and also cut the alabaster tabernacle.

Behind the sanctuary is the piece worth the ticket on its own. The Trasaltar is five panels set into the inner face of the ambulatory, all by Vasco de la Zarza, with the evangelists on the flanks and bishop Alonso de Madrigal, El Tostado, in the centre.

Work round the nine girola chapels. The one in the middle, Nuestra Señora de Gracia, keeps a 1496 altarpiece attributed to the Maestro de Ávila and a Virgin and Child window of 1497 by Juan de Valdivieso and Diego de Santillana. The Capilla de San Segundo, off the ambulatory, holds a baroque baldachin carved by José Benito de Churriguera in 1716. In the south transept the former Capilla de San Blas gave up Gothic wall paintings when its altarpiece was taken down in 1964, and the space was rededicated to Santa Teresa. The alabaster baptismal font of 1514 to 1516 is also Vasco de la Zarza’s.

The museum sits in the Capilla del Cardenal, built for archbishop Quiroga in 1490 and used for the collection since 1962. El Greco’s portrait of Garcibáñez de Múxica, painted between 1604 and 1614, presides over the burial; the centre of the room is held by Juan de Arfe’s processional monstrance of 1571, silver, 1.70 metres tall and about 70 kilos, built as a six-storey tower. Adjoining rooms hold six illuminated choirbooks made on parchment by Juan de Carrión in the 15th century.

Finish in the cloister, begun in the 14th century and topped in the 16th with a granite Renaissance cresting. It was glazed for the Las Edades del Hombre exhibition in 2004, and the display cases in the east and south walks now show processional crosses and chalices, including the Cáliz de San Segundo of 1320. Allow at least an hour for the whole circuit, longer if you use the full audioguide route.

Tips

• Ticket tiers are published on the official visit page: €10 for ages 18 to 64, €9 for over-65s, unemployed visitors and large families, €7 for ages 13 to 17 with an adult, for Carnet Joven holders and for university students up to 25.

• Entry is free for under-12s, for people from Ávila, for priests, and for visitors with accredited disability above 64% plus one companion.

• There is also a free window on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 08:30 to 09:30, excluding public holidays and the days before them. It falls before general opening and runs into the 09:00 weekday mass, so treat it as a short, quiet look rather than a full visit.

• The audioguide is part of the ticket, not an extra, and follows a 26-stop route through the nave, the girola, the sacristy, the museum and the cloister. A separate children’s script exists in Spanish, English, French and Italian.

• Visits to the bell tower and the bell-ringer’s house are suspended while the towers are being restored, so ignore any source that sells you a tower climb. When it runs, the climb is a €3 supplement on the standard ticket.

• Tower slots, when open, are guided and never free-roaming: be at the meeting point five minutes before your time, and expect cancellations in bad weather.

• Closing time shifts with the season. The site’s banner lists 20:30 in July and August and 19:30 in September, against the 20:00 given on the visit page, so check the day you go if you are planning a late arrival.

• Bring a layer whatever the month. The city sits at 1,132 metres and the interior is granite and sandstone, so it stays cold long after the square outside has warmed up.

• Look at the west front before you leave, even though you no longer enter through it. Two wild men, called Gog and Magog, stand in the jambs, and the white stone balustrade above carries local saints including Vicente, Sabina and Cristeta, with El Salvador in the middle under the cathedral’s coat of arms.

• For group bookings and questions about the tourist visit, the cathedral lists a dedicated number, +34 678 952 984, separate from the parish line.