Seville Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

When the cathedral chapter of Seville decided in 1401 to replace the old mosque with a new church, tradition says they vowed to build something so beautiful that those who saw it finished would take them for madmen. They kept their word: Santa María de la Sede became the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, a forest of pillars beneath which the retablo mayor rises like a golden cliff, the largest altarpiece anywhere, a lifetime's work of carved scenes from the life of Christ. Outside, the Giralda still stands, the twelfth-century minaret of the Almohad mosque crowned with a Renaissance belfry, 104 meters of Seville's layered history. Inside, four crowned heralds of Castile, León, Aragon, and Navarre carry the tomb of Christopher Columbus on their shoulders, and in the Royal Chapel rests the incorrupt body of Saint Ferdinand III, the king who returned Seville to Christian worship in 1248. It is a building that overwhelms on purpose, and then, in some quiet side chapel, surprises you with silence.