Church of San Francisco, Ourense
14th-century Gothic church moved stone by stone across Ourense in 1929, its cloister left behind
Visit details
Overview
The Church of San Francisco is a 14th-century Gothic church on the edge of the Parque de San Lázaro in central Ourense, and it did not start out there. Between 1928 and 1929 it was taken apart and rebuilt stone by stone on its present site, across town from the Franciscan convent it had belonged to since about 1310.
What did not move was the cloister. The 14th-century Gothic cloister stayed on the slope of Montealegre, where the municipal tourism board rates it a jewel of Galician Gothic and counts 63 carved arches around a courtyard that is not quite square. Anyone who comes to Ourense for the Gothic should understand this before setting out: church and cloister are now two separate visits at two separate addresses, and the cloister is the better of the two.
The reason the cloister stayed behind is structural rather than sentimental. When the church was dismantled, the walls of the main nave with their buttresses were deliberately left standing, because they form the closed southern side of the cloister; take them away and the cloister loses a wall. So what travelled to San Lázaro was the chancel and the facade, and what remains at Montealegre is a cloister attached to the skeleton of a church that is no longer there.
The church itself is small, wedged between modern blocks, and easy to walk past. Its case for ten minutes of your time is the portal: a rose window above, a triple archivolt below, and capitals carved with plants, animals and human figures, including a bagpiper that the tourism office treats as the building’s signature detail. Inside there are four 16th-century sepulchres of the Noboa and Puga families, cut in plateresque style with armour and heraldry.
Both buildings carry protection. The cloister was declared a historic-artistic monument in 1923, and the church followed with cultural interest status in January 1951 and national historic-artistic monument status on 16 February of the same year. The old convent around the cloister has since been rebuilt into the city’s cultural complex, with a municipal auditorium, and the Biblioteca Nodal and provincial archive installed from 2019.
History
The first convent and the fire
Franciscans were present in Ourense from at least 1238, though their first house is not documented until 1250 or 1251, when they were given a convent building on what is now the Plaza del Corregidor, east of the cathedral. A church there was planned from 1252 and under construction by 1255. None of it survives.
The reason it does not survive is a quarrel with the bishop. In 1289 Pedro Yáñez de Noboa banned worship and burials at the friary after the Franciscans gave sanctuary to a man who had killed the prelate’s nephew, and in December 1294 or the first months of 1295 the complex was set alight, with several deaths, driving the friars out of the city to Allariz.
Yáñez de Noboa was excommunicated for it and later pardoned by Pope Clement V on condition that he repair the damage, an obligation set down in a papal bull of 1307 or 1308 that required the cathedral chapter to hand over land for a new convent and the bishop to pay for the building. He died in 1308 before work started, so his heirs carried the cost, with support from Gonzalo Núñez de Noboa and from bishop Gonzalo Daza y Osorio, both relatives. Work on the replacement is thought to have begun around 1310 and finished by about 1330 or 1350. Documents from 1348 record a hostel and an infirmary on the site.
Montealegre and the Gothic cloister
The new convent went up at the foot of Montealegre, on the upper side of the city, and the Gothic cloister was raised there in the 14th century, joined by a second cloister in the 18th. The Franciscans stayed until the 19th century.
Soldiers in the convent
The Mendizábal disentailment closed the convent in 1835, leaving the church without worship and in the hands of the bishopric. The town council, which owned the convent, handed it to the army on 25 April 1843, and it became an infantry barracks known as the Cuartel de San Francisco. That use lasted well over a century.
The barracks stopped operating in 1984 and was definitively closed on 31 December 1987, with the keys formally returned to the town council on 18 June 1993. Meanwhile the church had its own custodians: the Venerable Orden Tercera looked after it from 1867 until 1920, after which it stood abandoned for close to a decade and its furnishings were dispersed around the city, including part of a retablo now in the church of Santa Eufemia and an Inmaculada by Juan de Juni now held in the Museo Arqueológico Provincial.
The move, 1928 to 1929
In 1925 the Franciscans took a house under construction beside the Parque de San Lázaro, using the nearby Capilla de San Lázaro because they had no church of their own. That same year, on the initiative of the priest Samuel Eiján, the bishop approved selling part of the old church’s site to the Ministry of Defence so the barracks could be enlarged, and the sale was authorised in 1927.
On the advice of the Provincial Monuments Commission, chaired by the writer Marcelo Macías, the stone-by-stone transfer began in 1928 under the architect Manuel Conde Fidalgo, and the rebuilt church was inaugurated on 30 May 1929. What was moved was the chancel and the facade; the nave walls and their buttresses stayed put as the southern boundary of the cloister.
The move had heavyweight backing at the time, including the writer Ramón Otero Pedrayo, but the verdict since has been harsh. It is now generally read as an error, both for stripping the old convent of its church and for leaving the building half-concealed among modern blocks; Juan Carlos Rivas, a former director of the municipal museum, called the whole operation a botched job. One consequence is easy to see from a pew. Light originally entered the stained glass from the east; after the rebuild the orientation changed, and it now comes in from the north-west.
Protection and reuse
Protection arrived late for the church and early for the cloister. The cloister was declared a historic-artistic monument in 1923, five years before the church was taken apart, while the church was declared an asset of cultural interest in January 1951 and a national historic-artistic monument on 16 February 1951.
The convent buildings have since been turned into Ourense’s main cultural complex, holding a sculpture gallery, the municipal auditorium, and, from 2019, the Biblioteca Nodal and the provincial archive. The rehabilitation, by the architects Casabella and Raído, took a special mention at the 2020 architecture and urbanism awards of Spain’s colleges of architects.
Visiting
Two visits, two addresses. The church sits at Rúa Xaquín Lorenzo Fernández 7, beside the Parque de San Lázaro, and opens for worship rather than for sightseeing. The cloister is at Rúa Emilia Pardo Bazán 37, on the Montealegre slope, and keeps proper opening hours. Both are free.
The church
Timing is the whole problem. According to the diocese, weekday Mass is at 09:30, 12:00 and 19:00, with the evening service moving to 20:00 in July and August; on Sundays and feast days it runs at 10:00, 11:00, 12:00 and 13:00, dropping the 13:00 in high summer. Arrive fifteen or twenty minutes before a service and you can look around without sitting through it.
Start outside, with the facade. A rose window sits in the upper body above a drip moulding, and the doorway below has a triple archivolt flanked by two buttresses, with a trilobed arch framing the double wooden door. The columns mix smooth and fluted shafts, and their capitals carry plant, animal and human carving, the bagpiper among them.
The portal also carries a stone Annunciation group, which appears to be one of the earliest examples of that subject spreading into Spanish mendicant church doorways. Note that this is the piece that was not reinstalled until 1955, so you are looking at medieval carving reassembled in the middle of the 20th century. Look along the joints and the margins of the arch if you want to see where the fabric was cut and reset.
Inside, the plan is a Latin cross with a single nave and three polygonal chapels at the head, the chapels roofed with rib vaults while the nave and crossing keep a wooden ceiling over pointed arches. The main chapel is presided over by a carving of St Francis embracing Christ on the cross, with 18th-century choir stalls below it that survive only in fragments, broken up by the move.
The tourism board describes these as Gothic tombs of the Noboa family, lords of Maceda, and of the Cadórniga family, and the heraldry on them is the point: armour, escutcheons, fine cutting. Two Gothic wall recesses in the main chapel have lost their tombs entirely, one of them once part of the funerary monument of Pedro Díaz de Cadórniga.
Before you leave, count the glass. There are 34 windows, 31 of them by the Casa Maumejean and installed in the early 20th century by the architect Daniel Vázquez-Gulías, the other three geometric panels made by a glass workshop in 1993.
The cloister
This is the reason to make the second trip. The cloister opens Tuesday to Saturday from 11:30 to 13:30 and 18:00 to 21:00, Sundays from 11:30 to 13:30, and on Mondays you go in through the historical archive between 09:00 and 19:30; access is free.
Sixty-three arches run round the courtyard, every one carved with plant motifs, animals both real and imaginary, and human figures, in a Galician Gothic that still shows heavy Romanesque influence. The plan only looks square: no two sides carry the same number of arches. The arches rest on paired columns except for the first four and the last four, the side walls hold several funerary recesses, and the entrance to the Sandoval funerary chapel sits under a scalloped arch.
Beside the cloister you can still see the nave of the old church standing without its chancel or facade, and attached to it on the south side is the Capilla de la Venerable Orden Tercera, now an exhibition space showing part of the holdings of the Museo Arqueológico Provincial.
Tips
- The church has no visiting hours in the usual sense. The municipal listing simply says it opens according to worship, so plan around Mass: 09:30, 12:00 and 19:00 on weekdays, 20:00 instead of 19:00 in July and August, and 10:00, 11:00, 12:00 and 13:00 on Sundays and feast days, without the 13:00 in high summer.
The quietest window is the twenty minutes before a weekday service, when the doors are unlocked but the congregation has not arrived. Midday Sunday is the opposite: four services back to back, and no realistic chance of looking at the tombs without getting in someone’s way. Nobody will sell you a ticket and nobody will hand you a leaflet, so read up before you go in.
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If you only have time for one of the two sites, make it the cloister. It keeps real hours, Tuesday to Saturday 11:30 to 13:30 and 18:00 to 21:00, Sunday mornings 11:30 to 13:30, and it is free.
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Monday is not a closed day at the cloister, but the route in changes: you enter through the historical archive, which runs from 09:00 to 19:30. Ask at the desk rather than circling the block looking for a monument entrance.
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Give the cloister capitals the same treatment. All 63 arches are carved, with mythological creatures, animals and foliage, and the tourism board describes the set as a catalogue rather than a decorative border.
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The Cementerio de San Francisco sits nearby, in what used to be the convent’s kitchen garden. It was declared an asset of cultural interest on 11 February 2000 and has belonged to the European Association of Significant Cemeteries since 2015.
The writers Eduardo Blanco Amor (1897 to 1979), Ramón Otero Pedrayo (1888 to 1976) and Valentín Lamas Carvajal (1849 to 1906) are buried there, as is Daniel Vázquez-Gulías (1869 to 1937), the architect who fitted the church’s Maumejean stained glass. The cemetery was opened on 9 May 1834 on land the Franciscans had ceded in 1822, and survived a serious attempt to close and dismantle it in 1998.
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Bring a layer. The church interior holds the cold even in a heatwave, and Ourense gets serious summer heat, reaching 44.1 °C in July 2022.
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Treat the church as an active parish, not a museum. Keep phones silent, skip photography while a service is running, and dress as you would for any working church.
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For practical questions, the municipal tourism office number listed by Spain’s national tourism site is +34 988 231 534. Expect Spanish or Galician rather than English.
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Do not go looking for a bell tower. The 1599 belfry vanished during the 1928 to 1929 move and was never rebuilt, which is part of why the church reads as oddly truncated from the street.
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