Palma Cathedral

Overview

The Cathedral of Santa Maria of Palma, known on Mallorca simply as La Seu, is the Gothic cathedral begun in 1229 on the site of the main mosque of Madina Mayurqa, and it sits on the seashore against the city walls between the Almudaina royal palace and the Episcopal Palace. It is the most visited attraction in Palma, and if you only go inside one building in the old town, this is the one.

What makes the interior worth the ticket is space and light rather than decoration. The central nave is roughly 44 metres high, the eighth-highest church nave in the world, and the octagonal pillars carrying it are the narrowest anywhere relative to the span they hold up: one twelfth of the vault width, against one sixth at Reims. The result is a hall with almost nothing in the way, lit from a rose window that sits over the main apse instead of at the west end, and which at nearly 14 metres across is the second-largest Gothic rose window still standing, after Strasbourg’s.

Sixteen chapels line the naves and they cover nearly every style built on the island since the 13th century, from the Plateresque Chapel of Sant Jeroni to the Churrigueresque Chapel of Our Lady of the Crown to the chapel Miquel Barceló rebuilt in the 2000s. It is also still a working cathedral, with mass every day of the week, and Sundays are given over to worship rather than ticketed visits.

History

James I of Aragon took Madina Mayurqa in 1229 and ordered the city’s great mosque consecrated to the Virgin Mary, with a new church to be built using part of the mosque’s site. The first documents date from 1230, when Bishop Pere de Morella consecrated the altar stone, and the building you walk into today was started under James II, who reigned from 1276 to 1311.

The oldest surviving part is the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, completed in 1327 as a burial space for the Mallorcan monarchs, and set into the chevet behind the Royal Chapel. The last traces of the mosque went in 1386, by which point the cathedral was taking its present shape.

Work on the bell tower finished in 1498, at roughly the same time as the naves and their vaults. The 15th century closed out what the chapter called the Old Work, the stretch running as far as the two side portals, the Mirador and the Almoina. In the early 16th century masons began the choir enclosure, and they put it squarely in the middle of the main nave, which is where it stayed for four hundred years.

The decision to finish the building came in the 1570s with the New Work: the last four sets of columns, the main façade and the main portal. Glass went into the great rose window in 1599 and construction wound up in the 1630s, four centuries after the first stone.

Then came the Baroque. Through the 17th and 18th centuries the chapter filled the interior with altarpieces, paintings and sculpture in a post-Tridentine key, and added the Corpus Christi altarpiece, the cloister and a new chapterhouse.

By the 19th century the structural stonework was in bad shape, and an earthquake in 1851 left the whole main façade at risk. The rebuild was handed to the Madrid architect Juan Bautista Peyronnet. The original west front had a flat top; Peyronnet’s replacement gave it the gable and pinnacles you see now, and apart from the main portal the entire façade was rebuilt in a French-influenced neo-Gothic.

Antoni Gaudí was brought in to oversee restoration from 1903, at the urging of Bishop Pere Joan Campins, and he rearranged the interior rather than repairing it. The choir stalls and screen were lifted out of the centre of the nave and pushed against the side walls of the presbytery, a canopy was hung above the altar, Baroque and Gothic altarpieces were stripped out to put the 13th-century Bishop’s Chair and the royal tombs back in view, bricked-up windows were reopened, and Gaudí designed ceramic panels with heraldic motifs for the choir. He and his collaborators walked off in 1914 after falling out with the local authorities, leaving the plans unfinished, and the work has been criticised ever since for destroying Mudejar and Baroque decoration. The cathedral was made a minor basilica in 1905 and declared a protected historic-artistic monument in 1931.

The most recent intervention ran from 2001 to 2006, when the Mallorcan painter Miquel Barceló rebuilt the Chapel of Sant Pere and the Holy Sacrament at the end of the southern nave. He covered the apse in Italian ceramic showing the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes and the Wedding at Cana in a local setting, designed new furnishings, and replaced the glass with grisaille panes meant to suggest the bottom of the sea. The project drew hard criticism both for cutting into a historic space and for what Barceló was paid, and it went ahead with the bishop’s backing.

Visiting

Everyone enters through the Cathedral Museum door on Plaça de la Seu, and if you booked online you skip the queue by using the fast-access lane at the Portal del Mirador. Tourist hours are Monday to Friday 10:00 to 17:15 from April to November and 10:00 to 15:15 from December to March, Saturdays 10:00 to 14:15 all year, and Sundays closed. The standard adult ticket is 11 euros and includes the Museu d’Art Sacre de Mallorca, the sacred art collection next door; over-65s pay 9 euros and a reduced 8 euro ticket is sold at the desk on production of a student, unemployment or disability document.

Inside, walk the length of the central nave first and do not stop at the chapels on the way. The point of the building only registers from about halfway down, where the pillars stop reading as supports and the rose window is directly ahead over the altar. At the far end is the Royal Chapel, with the marble tombs of James II and James III of Mallorca beside the white marble Episcopal Throne of 1346.

Gaudí’s canopy hangs above the altar and his 110 choir stalls, good Catalan Gothic woodwork, now line the presbytery walls rather than blocking the nave. Work back down the southern side to Barceló’s chapel, which is the sharpest contrast in the building: rough ceramic and dim grisaille glass at the end of a nave otherwise made of flat pale stone.

The terraces are a separate product and the best thing here if you can manage the stairs. The route runs along the flying-buttress terraces past the bell tower and up level with the main rose window, with the city and the bay below. The combined cathedral and terraces ticket is 25 euros, or 8 euros for residents, and the season runs April to November.

If you would rather have the commentary than the view, there is a cathedral, museum and audio guide ticket at 16 euros.

Worship runs on its own timetable and the doors open for it outside tourist hours: Monday to Friday 08:30 to 09:45, Saturdays 08:30 to 09:30 and 18:30 to 19:45, Sundays and public holidays 09:30 to 12:45 and 18:30 to 19:45. Mass is at 09:00 with Lauds on weekdays, 09:00 and 19:00 on Saturdays, and 09:55 with Lauds, 10:30, 12:00 and 19:00 on Sundays and holidays. Come at one of those times and you get the building as a church, with the light doing the same thing and nobody photographing it.

The cathedral and the sacred art museum are both accessible to visitors with reduced mobility; the terraces are not, and there are no wheelchairs to borrow on site. Assistance dogs are the only animals allowed in.

Tips

• Book online at catedraldemallorca.org and go straight to the fast lane at the Portal del Mirador. It is the single thing that saves the most time here, and it costs nothing extra.

• Do not buy a separate museum ticket. The 11 euro adult entry already covers the Museu d’Art Sacre de Mallorca.

• The discounts that matter are only sold at the ticket desk, not online: 9 euros if you are over 65, 8 euros with a student card, unemployment card or disability certificate, and free entry with documentary proof for residents and natives of the Balearic Islands, children aged 9 and under, and visitors with a disability of 65 per cent or more plus one companion.

• Residents and natives of the Balearics get the terraces free on Fridays, again only by collecting the ticket at the cathedral desk with proof.

• Book the terrace slot several days ahead in spring and summer. Places go every 30 minutes and are capped, and once your slot has started you are not let in.

• In December to March the last entry is 15:15 on weekdays and 14:15 on Saturdays, so an afternoon plan does not work in winter.

• Sunday is not a visiting day. The only way in is to attend a service, at 09:55, 10:30, 12:00 or 19:00.

• Dress rules are written down and enforced: no see-through clothes, no tops that leave the shoulders bare, no trousers or skirts above mid-thigh, no swimwear, and nothing designed to draw attention.

• There is no cloakroom and no locker room, and suitcases or bulky bags are refused at the door, so do not fit the cathedral in around a flight or a ferry.

• Phone the cathedral on +34 971 71 31 33 if a public holiday falls in your window, since the calendar of closures shifts with Easter each year.