SPAIN | Santander, Spain Travel Guide
Thursday, April 25, 2024
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Catedral
La Mancha,
Santander
Cantabria
Spain
Type: Historical Interest
Addmission Fee: Free entry.
Hours: Open 10 am-1 pm and 4-7:30 pm; Iglesia del Cristo 8 am-1 pm and 5-8 pm.
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Santander
Cantabria
Spain
Type: Historical Interest
Addmission Fee: Free entry.
Hours: Open 10 am-1 pm and 4-7:30 pm; Iglesia del Cristo 8 am-1 pm and 5-8 pm.
Comments ( 0 )
Rating (0 Votes)
Santander’s oldest surviving monument, the Gothic Catedral dates to the 13th century, though much of what is visible today was built in the 1950s after the 1941 fire had all but stripped, gutted and partially leveled it. The Catedral is neither visually impressionable nor boorish. It is utilitarian in scope and curious in design, as it is in fact two churches, the latest built atop the earliest and both sharing the same ground plan.
In the northern nave of the lower crypt known as the Iglesia del Cristo, a glass floor reveals the excavations of a Roman settlement built on this hillock after the Romans had conquered the region around 25 BC, during the reign of Augustus. Silver reliquaries encase the skulls of two Roman soldiers, Celedonius and Emetherius, martyred around the year 300 and thereafter delivered to the site, which hastened the construction of the earliest monastery and invited numerous pilgrimages.
The high church, surrounded by 17th-century chapels, was reopened in 1953 after extensive remodeling and additions that included a new ambulatory, transept and dome. It was rebuilt in the Gothic style with certain classical motifs added to set it apart from that which remains of the original church. Of the interior, chapel relics that were hurriedly spirited away before the fire, as well as one altarpiece, remain from the original holdings.
Lying among saints, the tomb of the revered Sananderine writer Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo occupies a space near the northern nave. A marble stone next to the sacristy door bearing a poetic Arabic inscription is said to have been taken from Sevilla by Cantabrian sailors who participated in that city’s Reconquest from the Moors. With it they returned to Santander, capital of a region that had never fallen into the hands of the Moorish invaders.
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