Church of the Santísima Trinidade, Ourense

Overview

The Church of the Santísima Trindade is a working parish church on the edge of the old town in Ourense, built and altered between the 12th and 16th centuries, with two squat cylindrical towers on its west front that make it read as a small castle rather than a church. The city’s tourism office counts it among the oldest churches still standing in Ourense.

Those towers are the reason to walk up. They are not survivors of the first church but the result of a 15th and 16th century rebuild, which also wrapped the east end in heavy buttresses and ran a flamboyant Gothic cresting of pinnacles along the cornice. The tower at the north corner carries a square bell chamber on top.

The church grew up beside a hospital for pilgrims, and its enclosed atrium was laid over a Roman burial ground. A plateresque stone cross stands in that atrium, and the gate you pass through to reach it was lifted from a second, later hospital elsewhere in the city.

Set expectations before you climb the hill. This is a parish, not a monument with a ticket desk: there is no admission charge, no visitor route and no published sightseeing hours. The doors open for mass and close again after it. Fifteen or twenty minutes covers it, and the best carving is outside the church door anyway.

History

A hospital for pilgrims is documented on this spot in the 12th century, sited here in all likelihood because of Ourense’s hot springs, and the church went up next to it between the late 12th and the early 13th century. The Hospital da Trindade would have occupied the ground where the parish house now stands, next to the church.

Almost nothing of that hospital survives. One doorway onto the atrium remains, an ogee arch cut with a sawtooth border, and on the church’s side portal, which faced the hospital, someone carved a scallop shell.

The 15th and 16th century rebuild

The reforms that produced the present building were pushed through by the abbot Ochoa de Espinosa, who acted for Bernardino de Bibiena, commendatory abbot of the Monastery of Oseira. They gave the church its two cylindrical towers, the buttressed east end and the pinnacled cresting.

The same century fitted out the interior. The main altarpiece is a 16th century plateresque piece by Cornielles de Holanda, the sculptor responsible for the high altarpiece of Ourense Cathedral, which is why a modest parish church ends up with work by a first-rank name.

Two medallions flank that gate, generally read as the physicians Hippocrates and Galen, an appropriate pairing for a hospital front. A triangular pediment holds Saint Roch in a niche, two grotesque figures standing for evil sit at the ends, an angel crowns the apex, and a small Pietà is carved on the inner face.

The stone cross inside the atrium is also an import. It is plateresque, 15th century, and stood earlier in the Horta do Concello, the ground now known as the Alameda. Jácome de Moure carved it, father of the better-known Ourense sculptor Francisco de Moure, and worked in images of Christ and the Pietà plus four medallions for the evangelists. It stands over the Roman necropolis on which the atrium was built.

Visiting

Nothing here runs on a visitor timetable. The Concello de Ourense lists the church as opening “according to worship”, daily at 10:00, 12:00 and 19:00. The diocese is more precise: mass on working days at 10:00 and 19:00, and on Sundays and holidays at 10:00, 12:00 and 19:00, the same all year with no summer shift. There is no ticket office and no charge. Turn up twenty minutes before a mass or hang back at the end of one, and be honest with yourself that outside those windows you may find the door shut.

The address is Praza da Trindade 5, in the upper old town. You enter through the transplanted Renaissance gate, cross the walled atrium past the plateresque cross, and only then reach the church itself.

Two portals let you in, and they are worth a minute each. The west front has a triple archivolt of pointed arches springing from plain shafts with varied capitals; the underside of the lower arch is cut with spiky projections, and the keystone and springers carry roughly hewn faces, badly eroded. The north portal, on the gospel side, is shallower, has no tympanum, and shows three late Romanesque archivolts decorated with four-petalled flowers, balls and roll mouldings, with sawtooth on the outermost arch.

Inside it is one long hall, a basilican plan with a single nave and no transept. The nave is covered by a false vault and divided into bays by pointed arches, while the polygonal main chapel gets the real thing: a ribbed vault with a thicket of ribs and heavily decorated bosses.

The Cornielles de Holanda altarpiece fills the main chapel: dark green polychromy picked out in gold, five tiers, five vertical bays and an attic with a crucified Christ, God the Father behind him and the Holy Spirit as a dove overhead. A large Sacred Heart of Jesus presides at the centre, with smaller figures including Saint Rita of Cascia, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint Benedict, Saint Blaise, Saint Roch and Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

Work along the walls before you leave. The epistle wall carries Saint Anthony of Padua and Saint Lucy of Syracuse, along with a full Calvary group: Our Lady of Sorrows as a dressed figure, the crucified Christ and Saint John carved in the round. The gospel wall has a large painting of the Virgin handing the chasuble to Saint Ildefonsus of Toledo. By the entrance, a twin holy-water stoup sits beside a sculpture of Saint John the Baptist.

Tips

• Build your visit around the mass times, because there are no others. Working days 10:00 and 19:00; Sundays and holidays 10:00, 12:00 and 19:00, unchanged through the year.

• Entry is free and there is nobody to buy a ticket from. Turismo de Ourense publishes no admission price and no guided-visit programme for the church.

• Arriving during a service is fine, walking the aisles during one is not. Stay at the back, keep the camera down until people have left, and save the slow circuit of the altarpieces for afterwards.

• Download the audio guide before you go. The municipal tourism site provides an audio guide and a sign-language guide for this church, both in Spanish, and there is no interpretation waiting for you at the door.

• The main altarpiece is dark green with gilded detail, so it reads best while the lights are on for a service. Come for the tail end of a mass rather than an empty hour if you want to actually see it.

• Pair it with the cathedral. Ourense Cathedral shares the same fortified look, and seeing the two within an hour makes the point about local church-building better than either does alone.