Valencia Cathedral

Overview

Valencia Cathedral is the Gothic mother church of the archdiocese, begun on 22 June 1262 on the site of the city’s main mosque and dedicated to Saint Mary. Two things pull visitors through the door: an agate cup kept in its own chapel and venerated as the Holy Chalice of the Last Supper, and the Micalet bell tower, climbed from a separate entrance outside.

The €12 ticket buys one continuous loop through the church and the cathedral museum, with an audio guide you are required to carry; the rest of the building stays open, free, for people who have come to pray rather than look. On that loop you pass two Goya canvases painted in 1788 for the chapel of Saint Francis Borgia, the tomb of the poet Ausiàs March, and a ceiling of Renaissance musician angels over the high altar that nobody saw between 1674 and 2004.

The building itself reads as a set of arguments between centuries. The Almoina gate on the east side is Romanesque, the Gate of the Apostles facing Plaça de la Verge is 14th-century Gothic, the main door onto Plaça de la Reina is Baroque ironwork from 1703, and an 18th-century neoclassical skin covered the lot until restorers began stripping it off in the 1970s. Valencians have a saying for anything that drags on: “Això és més llarg que l’obra de la Seu”, longer than the work on the cathedral.

Everything sits inside the old town of Valencia, with three squares wrapped around it: Plaça de la Reina at the main door, Plaça de la Verge behind the apse, and Plaça de l’Almoina on the east side, where excavation has exposed the Roman, Visigothic and Islamic layers the cathedral was built on top of.

History

The mosque came first, and it survived the Christian conquest by a generation. On 9 October 1238 it was dedicated as the cathedral of Saint Mary, Qur’anic inscriptions still on the walls, and it stayed standing until Bishop Andreu d’Albalat resolved to demolish it and build from scratch to plans by the architect Arnau Vidal. The first stone went down on 22 June 1262.

Work started at the east end: the ambulatory with its eight radiating chapels, and the Romanesque Almoina gate. The masons quarried nearby at Burjassot and Godella, but also brought stone by boat from Benidorm and Xàbia down the coast. Between 1300 and 1350 the crossing went up, along with three of the four bays of the naves and transepts and the beginnings of the octagonal lantern over the crossing that Valencians call the cimbori.

The chapter house of 1356 to 1369, where the canons met to argue about their own affairs, is the room that now holds the Holy Chalice. The cup arrived on 18 March 1437, handed over by Alfonso V the Magnanimous. Both the chapter house and the bell tower started life as free-standing structures. It took the architects Francesc Baldomar and Pere Compte, working from 1459 on the extension known as the Arcada Nova, to stretch the nave far enough west to swallow them, which is how the church reached its present 94 metres by 53.65 metres.

Valencia’s century was the one that followed. Alfonso de Borja, bishop here, was elected Pope Calixtus III on 8 April 1455; the see was raised to metropolitan rank on 9 July 1492; and on 11 August that same year Rodrigo de Borja, also bishop of Valencia, became Alexander VI. A silver main altarpiece followed in 1493, and its painted doors in 1505.

Taste turned against the Gothic in the 18th century. Konrad Rudolf designed the concave main door in 1703, the Iron Gate, and the War of the Spanish Succession left the Vergara brothers to finish it. Then in 1774 Antoni Gilabert Fornés began a full neoclassical remodelling: pinnacles knocked off outside, stucco and pseudo-classical trim pasted over the Gothic inside, on the reasoning that the original was crude. Leo XIII granted the church the title of minor basilica on 18 September 1886, by which point Goya’s two canvases had hung in the Borgia chapel for a century.

The 20th century took things away and then gave some back. The cathedral was declared a historic and artistic landmark in 1931, looted and partly destroyed on 21 July 1936, and lost a good deal of its decoration in the process.

Popes keep coming back to the cup. John Paul II visited on 8 November 1982, Benedict XVI on 8 July 2006, and in 2015 the Apostolic Penitentiary made the archdiocese a perpetual Jubilee site in recognition of its custody of the relic.

Visiting

General admission is €12 and includes the cathedral museum plus an audio guide in ten languages, among them English, Valencian, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish. Reduced entry is €6 for pensioners, unemployed and disabled visitors, students and children aged 8 to 17. A family pack covering two adults and up to three children of that age is €22, groups with an official guide or teacher pay €5 a head, and €1 covers residents of the city of Valencia and of the archdiocese on production of documentation, along with schools, universities and parishes of the Valencian Community. Children under 8 go free, as do official guides of the Valencian Community, priests, members of religious orders, and the companion of a visitor with a certified disability of 65% or more.

There is no online ticket shop on the cathedral’s own site, so you buy at the counter inside the entrance. Group bookings and Jubilee pilgrimages are arranged by email, and there is a phone line for visit enquiries.

Hours

From 1 January to 30 June and again from 1 October to 31 December, the cultural visit runs Monday to Friday 10:30 to 18:30, Saturday 10:30 to 17:30 and Sunday 14:00 to 17:30, with last entry at 17:30 on weekdays and 16:30 at weekends. From 1 July to 30 September it is Monday to Saturday 10:30 to 18:30 and Sunday 14:00 to 18:30, last entry 17:30 throughout. There is no cultural visit at all on 1 January, 6 January, 19 March, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, 9 October, 8 December and 25 December, and the schedule bends around whatever religious service is happening.

The route

The audio guide walks you down the right-hand nave first, past the chapel of Saint Francis Borgia with its two Goya paintings, the tomb of Ausiàs March and the stained glass above. The main chapel is where you stop and look up at the musician angels. The ambulatory behind it holds the chapel of the Resurrection and the relic of Saint Vincent Martyr, the patron’s left arm, and the left-hand nave brings you back past the Gothic rose window in the crossing.

The museum comes next, and it is more substantial than the word suggests: an archaeological excavation with Roman, Visigothic, Islamic and medieval remains under the floor, original 14th-century figures from the Gate of the Apostles, 15th and 16th-century panel painting including Juan de Juanes, canvases by Jerónimo Jacinto de Espinosa and Vicente López, the reliquaries of the Kings of Aragon, and the 20th-century Corpus Christi processional monstrance. The Chapel of the Holy Chalice, the 14th-century chapter house built under Bishop Vidal de Blanes, is the last room of the visit, so the cup you probably came for is the thing you see on the way out.

The Micalet

The bell tower is a separate ticket at €3, or €2 reduced, and its own door outside on Plaça de la Reina. It opens daily from 10:00 to 18:45 all year, with last entry half an hour before closing, and the terrace holds a maximum of 50 people at a time. The way up is 207 steps of a spiral staircase inside an octagonal shaft that is 51 metres to the terrace and 63 metres to the top of the belfry. There is no other way up, and the stair narrows above the bell chamber.

Tips

• Sunday mornings are for worship only. The cultural visit does not start until 14:00 on Sundays, and it closes at 17:30 outside high summer, so a Sunday afternoon gives you three and a half hours at most.

• Watch the weekend last entry. From October to June the doors stop admitting at 16:30 on Saturday and Sunday, an hour earlier than the weekday cutoff.

• Eight dates have no cultural visit at all: 1 and 6 January, 19 March, Palm Sunday, Good Friday, 9 October, 8 December and 25 December. The 9 October closure is the anniversary of the day the mosque was dedicated as the cathedral in 1238.

• The Valencia Card knocks 20% off general admission. It does not apply to the Micalet, which is always sold separately.

• If you arrived on a Renfe Cercanías train, the +RENFE&TÚ card gets you the €6 reduced rate under a standing agreement between Renfe and the cathedral. Renfe staff with an employee card get it for themselves and one companion.

• Climb the tower first thing. Only 50 people fit on the terrace, the last ticket goes at 18:15, and there is no lift for 207 steps.

• The audio guide is not optional. Using one is a condition of visiting the church and museum outside worship hours, which is also why the paid route stays quiet.

• Groups and pilgrimages have to write ahead. Jubilee visits go through jubileosantocaliz@catedraldevalencia.es, stating group size and arrival time, and Micalet group bookings through a separate address.

• Time your walk out through Plaça de l’Almoina if you want the layer underneath: the excavation there exposed the Visigothic cathedral that became a mosque before the current church went up. The Llotja de la Seda is the other Gothic set piece worth an hour in the same quarter.