Cathedral of La Laguna

Overview

The Cathedral of La Laguna is the seat of the Diocese of San Cristóbal de La Laguna, a neo-Gothic church built between 1904 and 1915 behind a neoclassical stone façade of 1820. The diocese covers Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro, and this is one of the two cathedrals of the Canary Islands, the other being Santa Ana in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

Almost nothing you walk into is old, which catches most visitors off guard in a UNESCO-listed colonial town. The interior is three wide aisles and an ambulatory looping behind the presbytery, a layout unusual in the Canaries, lit by tall vertical windows over the altar and reading much more like medieval northern Europe than colonial Spain. The building sits at 559 m, so it is cooler and mistier than the coast even when the resorts are baking.

What earns the ticket is the contents rather than the shell. The Baroque altarpiece of the Virgen de los Remedios is the largest in the Canaries and carries seven panels attributed to Hendrick van Balen, who taught Van Dyck. The marble pulpit by Pasquale Bocciardo, shipped in from Genoa, is rated the finest marble work in the archipelago. Alonso Fernández de Lugo, the conquistador who took the island and founded the city, is buried here, and the chapter house next door holds the largest collection of Byzantine icons in Spain.

It is a working parish and a Marian sanctuary as well as a cathedral, so services run through the day and the sightseeing hours are shaped around them. The town itself, San Cristóbal de La Laguna, is why most people end up on the plaza at all.

History

Alonso Fernández de Lugo ordered a hermitage on this spot in 1511, dedicated to the Virgin of the Expectation, whose feast fell on 18 December. There are indications of a Guanche necropolis underneath, and the Aguere valley, with the large lagoon that gave the city its name, was a sacred enclave for the island’s aboriginal population.

A bigger Mudéjar church replaced the hermitage in 1515, and on 21 April of that year it was raised to parish status as Santa María de los Remedios, with the patronal feast fixed on 8 September. The tower went up in 1618.

Two baptisms in that older building are still traded as local currency: José de Anchieta, born in the city, missionary in Brazil, founder of São Paulo and later canonised, on 7 April 1534, and the corsair and merchant Amaro Pargo in 1678.

The church was enlarged in 1752 with a new transept and a widened main chapel carrying broad sacristies and dressing chambers for the image of the patron. Domingo de la Guerra, who ran the works and later became Marquis of San Andrés, deliberately overbuilt the main chapel because he expected the church to become the cathedral of Tenerife one day.

He was right, eventually. Petitions to make the parish a cathedral, a collegiate church or an auxiliary of Santa Ana in Las Palmas started in 1515 and kept failing. A serious push in 1783, during the city’s Enlightenment years, was blocked by the cathedral chapter and the bishop in Gran Canaria. A papal bull of 1 February 1819 finally split the single Canarian bishopric in two, and on 21 December 1819 Pius VII made this church the cathedral of the new Nivariense diocese, taking Tenerife, La Palma, La Gomera and El Hierro out of the jurisdiction of Las Palmas. The man who made it happen was Cristóbal Bencomo y Rodríguez, a La Laguna priest who happened to be confessor to Fernando VII and titular Archbishop of Heraclea. His tomb is in the presbytery, on the Epistle side.

The title did not stick first time. The Concordat of 1851 suppressed the Tenerife bishopric, and from 1851 to 1875 the church was demoted to a collegiate church, the only one that has ever existed in the Canaries. The diocese was restored in 1875 and the building got its cathedral rank and privileges back.

Only the façade survives from that older temple. Built in 1820 to the plans of Pamplona cathedral, it is the stone, neoclassical face of a building whose entire body was demolished and rebuilt between 1904 and 1915 in neo-Gothic concrete. Anyone hunting 16th-century stonework inside is in the wrong century.

The cathedral closed for restoration in 2002 and stayed shut for over a decade while the bureaucracy stalled, with the episcopal seat parked temporarily in the Iglesia de la Concepción. Survey work found the vaults and main dome so degraded that demolition was the only option: the dome came down in November 2009, the vaults and the columns dividing the three aisles followed, rebuilding started in 2012 and the new dome rose in November 2013. The building was reinaugurated on 25 January 2014 and reopened for worship on 31 January, when the image of the Virgen de los Remedios was carried back in procession from the Concepción. Pope Francis granted a jubilee year from 27 April 2014 to 12 April 2015 to mark the centenary and the reopening.

The cathedral was declared a National Historic-Artistic Monument on 5 October 1983 and holds bien de interés cultural status in the monument category. The old town wrapped around it went onto the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1999.

Visiting

Cultural visits run Monday to Friday 09:00 to 18:00 and Saturday 09:30 to 12:30, with no visiting on Sunday. General admission is €7, dropping to €6 for over-65s and €5.50 for 13 to 18s, students up to 25 and the unemployed, all on production of accreditation. Under-13s, residents of the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and visitors with a disability rating above 60% enter free, though free entry does not include the audio guide, which then costs €2. Everyone else gets the audio guide bundled with the ticket, in Spanish, English, French, German or Italian, plus a children’s version in Spanish and English. Tickets are sold at the door and online through the cathedral’s own shop.

You go in from Plaza de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, at the front of the building. The audio guide runs to fourteen stops, from a welcome inside the door through the side chapels, the treasury, the ambulatory, the presbytery, the choir and the baptistery.

The chapels

The chapel of Santa Bárbara has a neo-Gothic altar designed by the Santa Cruz artist Francisco Bonnín Guerín and built by the artillery corps of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where it originally stood in the church of San Francisco de Asís. Next along, the Virgen del Carmen chapel holds a carving that has been in the building since 1619, dressed to Baroque taste with a face frame that is unusual for this Marian title, and a Cristo de Burgos by Ezequiel de León replacing an earlier figure destroyed by fire in 1964. Ostrich eggs are laid at the foot of that cross, reviving a tradition attached to the Burgos original.

The Purísima Concepción chapel sits on the Epistle side, beside the Remedios chapel. Its 1915 altar deteriorated badly during the years the cathedral stood closed and has since been restored. The Virgen de la Luz here is a mid-16th-century import from the mainland, attributed to the circle of the Seville-based Flemish carver Roque Balduque.

The Candelaria chapel, also called the chapel of the Canarian saints, sits in the middle of the building beside the side door onto calle Bencomo. Its Virgin is a replica of the archipelago’s patron by the La Laguna sculptor Faustino Álvarez Hernández, flanked by images of the two canonised Canarians, José de Anchieta and the Santo Hermano Pedro de Betancur.

The altarpiece and the high altar

The Remedios altarpiece is the reason to slow down. Baroque, from the first half of the 18th century, it is the largest altarpiece in the Canary Islands, and it stands in an arm of the transept rather than behind the high altar, so the patron faces the main altar across the crossing. Seven painted panels are attributed to Hendrick van Balen, and the image stands under a silver baldachin throne with a silver sunburst behind her and a gilded crescent at her feet.

The high altar carries a marble tabernacle by the Gran Canarian sculptor José Luján Pérez, and on it the Santísimo Cristo de Los Remedios, considered a twin of the Santísimo Cristo de La Laguna and in the church since the 16th century. Behind it, in the ambulatory, hang oils of San Fernando Rey and Santa Isabel de Portugal, co-patrons of the cathedral and the diocese. The Carrara marble pulpit by Pasquale Bocciardo is the single best piece in the building.

The tower

Cathedral-and-tower tickets run Monday to Friday at 12:00 and 13:00 and Saturday at 12:00, last about 40 minutes, and are capped at ten people. The route takes you past the clock mechanism to the belfry and a panoramic view over the city. Prices are €10 general, €9 over 65, €8 for youth, students and the unemployed, and €3 for residents of the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife.

The icon museum and the treasury

The Casas Capitulares next door, a mid-18th-century Canarian townhouse, is the seat of the cathedral chapter and houses the Museo de los Iconos: 160 original Byzantine icons, most of them around 300 years old, from Russia, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, Italy and Greece, owned by the Tenerife bishopric and mostly arrived through private donations or merchant ships.

Services are worked around the visiting hours rather than the other way round. Masses run at 13:00 and 19:00 on weekdays, 13:00 and 17:30 on Saturdays and the eves of feast days, and at 08:00, 12:00, 13:00, 17:00 and 19:30 on Sundays and holidays. Weekday visiting closes at 18:00, an hour before the evening mass, and the Saturday slot ends at 12:30, half an hour before the 13:00 one.

Tips

• Go on a weekday. Saturday gives you three hours only, 09:30 to 12:30, and Sunday is shut to visitors entirely.

• Check the site before travelling. The cathedral posts special schedules for individual dates, closing early or skipping visits altogether on days with major services.

• Bring your paperwork if you qualify for a discount. Over-65s pay €6, and 13 to 18s, university students up to 25 and the unemployed pay €5.50, but the cathedral asks for accreditation.

• Free entry does not mean a free audio guide. Under-13s, provincial residents and visitors with a disability rating above 60% get in for nothing but pay €2 for the device, and since the audio guide is effectively the whole interpretation of the building, it is worth the coin.

• Groups of more than 15 pay a negotiated rate rather than the list price. Ring 681 197 236 or email ahead instead of turning up as a block.

• Dress for 559 m, not for the beach. La Laguna sits well above the resorts and the mist comes in fast.

• Time your visit around the big dates if you want the building working rather than quiet. Good Friday brings the Santísimo Cristo de La Laguna here before the Procesión Magna, 8 September is the feast of the Virgen de los Remedios with a procession through the streets, the Cristo returns for a solemn five-day novena from 9 to 14 September, and 2 February is the Procesión de Las Candelas.

• Do not treat this as the whole of the old town. The cathedral is one building on a UNESCO-listed 15th-century street grid, and the San Cristóbal de La Laguna guide covers what else is worth the walk.