Cathedral of Saint Peter of Vic

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Vic's cathedral is a building of layers: a Romanesque bell tower some 46 meters high, raised with the church that Bishop Oliba consecrated in 1038 and considered the finest Romanesque campanile in Catalonia, a Romanesque crypt, a fourteenth-century Gothic cloister, an alabaster high altarpiece carved by Pere Oller, and around them a great neoclassical nave rebuilt between 1781 and 1803. Its walls belong to Josep Maria Sert, who painted them twice: his first cycle burned in 1936, and he began again, covering the whole interior between 1939 and 1945 in sombre gold and black scenes of the Passion. Today the church remembers a son of this diocese, Anthony Mary Claret, feast day October 24: a weaver's boy from nearby Sallent who studied in the seminary here, walked the Catalan countryside preaching, and on July 16, 1849, gathered five young priests in a seminary room to found the Claretian Missionaries. He was consecrated bishop in this cathedral in 1850, served in Cuba and as the queen's confessor, and died in exile in France in 1870; his remains were brought back to Vic in 1897, and pilgrims still come to the city to pray beside them.