Burgos Cathedral

Overview

Burgos Cathedral is the Gothic cathedral of Burgos, begun in 1221 on a French plan and the only cathedral in Spain that UNESCO lists in its own right rather than as part of a wider historic city centre. Almost everything else about the building follows from that: the style arrived wholesale from north of the Pyrenees, the shell went up in about forty years, and every generation since has added chapels, tombs and ironwork to it without ever disturbing the original plan.

The general ticket is €11 and the doors open at 09:30 seven days a week. For that you get a Latin cross church covering 1.03 hectares, 124 metres long and 99 metres wide on the outside, with two openwork spires 88 metres up and an octagonal lantern over the crossing that rises 43 metres above the floor inside. Two hours is the honest minimum if you want to see the cloisters and the museum rather than jog past them.

Three things pull visitors through the door. Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, El Cid, is buried with his wife Doña Jimena under a plain marble slab in the middle of the crossing, moved here from the monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña in 1921 for the cathedral’s 700th anniversary. The Capilla del Condestable behind the high altar is a self-contained late Gothic mausoleum with its own star vault, open at the centre so daylight falls straight down onto the tombs. And high at the west end of the nave sits the Papamoscas, an 18th-century clockwork figure that opens its mouth and swings an arm to strike the hour.

History

There was a cathedral on this hillside before this one. Fernando III married Beatriz of Swabia in the Romanesque church here on 30 November 1219, and Bishop Mauricio, the man who had travelled to fetch her, had also been sent to look at the cathedrals of France. The old church was pulled down, and in July 1221 the king and the bishop laid the first stone of its replacement on the spot where the lantern now stands.

Work started at the east end and moved west, fast. The chevet was finished and in use for worship by around 1230, and the main nave was consecrated the same year so that services could continue while builders carried on around them. By 1240 the works were under a French master known in the records as Maestro Enrique, who drew heavily on Reims and who later took charge of León Cathedral; the interior elevation follows Bourges instead. Formal consecration came in 1260.

Then came the money. Burgos grew rich on the Castilian wool trade, and in the 15th century a family of German masons, the Colonia, gave the building its outline. Juan de Colonia raised the two openwork spires on the west front, paid for by bishops Alonso de Cartagena and Luis de Acuña, whose coats of arms sit on the parapets below the points. His son Simón began the Capilla del Condestable in 1482 for Pedro Fernández de Velasco and Mencía de Mendoza, who wanted a family pantheon; his grandson Francisco added the Pellejería door in 1516.

The family’s one disaster was the lantern. Juan de Colonia had built a tall, slender tower over the crossing around 1460 to 1470 for Bishop Acuña, and on the night of 3 to 4 March 1539 the north-side piers gave way and the whole thing came down, taking several vaults with it. It happened before dawn and nobody was killed. The chapter met that same day to arrange a replacement, and what you look up into now is Juan de Vallejo’s octagonal prism, built to a design by Juan de Langres, its eight faces each pierced by two large mullioned windows.

The 18th century worked in plaster rather than stone. The chapels of Santa Tecla, San Enrique and the Relics went in, along with the main sacristy, built between 1762 and 1765 with an elliptical dome and rococo plasterwork. A fire in 1782 forced a restoration of one spire, and neoclassical detail crept in with the repairs.

The worst damage was not medieval at all. On 13 June 1813, as the French garrison withdrew at the end of the Peninsular War, the castle on the hill above the cathedral was blown up. The blast took out almost all the glass: only half the windows of the Condestable chapel, the rose window over the Sarmental door and the two side oculi survived. That is why the interior is so much brighter and colder in tone than a French cathedral of the same date, and why the glass in the crossing is early 20th-century work and the lantern glazing dates from 2002.

A royal order of 8 April 1895 made the cathedral a national monument, and the bishop’s palace that had been built against its south flank was demolished to open up the view. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list on 13 October 1984. The most recent structural work replaced the roof with a light steel frame and glazed the vault above the crossing so the ribs are lit from behind, a programme pushed forward after a statue of San Lorenzo fell from the north tower on 12 August 1994. The eighth centenary ran through 2021 and 2022.

Visiting

Tourist visits enter through the Puerta del Sarmental, the 13th-century door on the south side; the postal address is Plaza de Santa María. Opening is 09:30 to 18:00 from 1 November to 18 March and 09:30 to 18:30 from 19 March to 31 October, and in both cases you are allowed to stay inside for a further hour after the last entry.

The general ticket is €11. Over-65s and groups of ten or fewer pay €10, pilgrims with a credential €6, students aged 19 to 27 along with unemployed, disabled and large-family visitors €5, and children aged 8 to 18 pay €3; under-7s are free but the ticket has to be collected at the desk. Every reduced ticket needs valid documentation shown at the ticket office on the day. Audioguide handsets rent for €1; the multimedia guide is free if you scan the QR code and download the app to your own phone, so bring headphones.

Once through the door you are in the south transept, and the sensible move is to walk straight to the middle. The crossing holds El Cid’s slab underfoot and Vallejo’s lantern overhead, flanked by two wrought-iron screens made to a design by Fray Pedro Martínez in the early 18th century. The choir sits in the nave immediately west of it, a U of walnut stalls carved by Bigarny with the wooden effigy of Bishop Mauricio in the middle, sheathed in copper and set with Limoges enamels.

From the crossing, work anticlockwise round the ambulatory to reach the Capilla del Condestable at the far east end. Its proper name is the Chapel of the Purification, and it is worth the detour for the vault alone: Simón de Colonia left the centre of the eight-pointed star open so light drops vertically onto the Carrara marble effigies of the constable and his wife. The main altarpiece is Diego de Siloé and Felipe Bigarny working together between 1523 and 1526, the entrance grille is Cristóbal de Andino’s, and there is a Magdalene by Giampietrino, a pupil of Leonardo, hanging inside.

Back in the north transept, the Escalera Dorada climbs the wall in two flights to the sealed Coronería door. Diego de Siloé designed it after returning from Italy and the French master Hilario made the balustrade; it exists because the ground outside is metres higher than the church floor. Turn and look west along the nave for the Papamoscas, high above the arcade. On the hour he strikes a bell and opens his mouth; on the balcony to his right a second automaton, the Martinillo, marks the quarters.

Finish with the cloisters, which most people rush. The upper cloister is late 13th-century work attributed to Maestro Enrique, and the chapels opening off it hold the cathedral museum: the Capilla de Santiago is the treasury, the Capilla del Corpus Christi has the medieval chest known as the Cofre del Cid hanging on the wall, and the Capilla de Santa Catalina is lined with painted portraits of every bishop of Burgos, 112 of them invented outright by Nicolás Antonio de la Cuadra between 1712 and 1714 because nobody knew what the early ones looked like. The lower cloister, a burial ground for centuries, is now an interpretation centre on how the building was put together, with carved fragments of the vanished Romanesque cathedral displayed in the San Pedro crypt chapel.

Tips

• Buy online if you are visiting in summer or over a long weekend. Tickets are sold through the cathedral’s ticketing partner at shop.articketing.com, linked from the official site; free Tuesday-morning tickets are the one thing you cannot get online.

• Time your arrival for a few minutes before the hour and stand in the nave, west of the choir, so the Papamoscas is in view when it strikes. Miss it and you wait an hour, or you settle for the Martinillo on the quarter.

• Pilgrims should have the credential out at the desk. It cuts the ticket from €11 to €6, the single biggest discount available, and the cathedral sits directly on the Camino through Burgos.

• Tourist visiting stops during the main services, so a mid-morning arrival on a Sunday is the surest way to find yourself locked out of the nave. Santa Tecla, the big Baroque chapel at the west end, keeps its own schedule of services alongside the high altar.

• Bring a layer. Burgos sits at 869 metres and the stone interior stays cold through the summer, which is worth remembering if you arrive in shorts after walking a stage of the Camino.

• Download the free multimedia guide before you go in rather than queueing for a €1 handset, and bring your own headphones. The QR code is given out at the entrance.

• Two hours covers the church, the Condestable chapel and both cloisters at a reasonable pace. If you only have one, skip the lower cloister interpretation centre rather than the museum chapels upstairs.