Pamplona Cathedral: The Principal Church of the Kingdom of Navarre
Site at a Glance
- Rating
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- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Classical, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Kingdom of Navarre, Roman, Spanish
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page18 sections
History
Pamplona Cathedral, formally the Cathedral of Santa Maria of the Assumption, is the Roman Catholic cathedral in Pamplona, Spain, and the seat of the Archdiocese of Pamplona and Tudela. Built by successive Christian communities on the highest part of the Old Town, it became a Gothic cathedral during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and served for nearly a millennium as the principal church of the Kingdom of Navarre.
Early episcopal and Roman foundations
The cathedral stands in the Navarreria district, within the oldest archaeologically attested part of Pamplona. Excavation has revealed remains from the First Iron Age and from the Roman city of Pompaelo, including the crossing of its principal streets, the cardo and decumanus. Pamplona’s episcopal see is recorded from 589, when its bishop attended the Third Council of Toledo. Further references occur in 592, 633, and 683, indicating an established episcopal center even though the earliest church at this location is not otherwise described.
A church on the site was destroyed in 924 during the campaign of Abd al-Rahman III. Sancho III of Navarre later rebuilt the first diocesan church, and Sancho Abarca donated the town of Pamplona to Santa Maria. In 1086, Bishop Pedro de Roda replaced the secular canons with a permanent community of regular canons following the Rule of Saint Augustine. This created the cathedral chapter, the body of clergy responsible for assisting with the cathedral’s administration and worship.
The Romanesque cathedral
A Romanesque cathedral was constructed between 1100 and 1127 and consecrated on 12 April 1127 by Bishop Sancho de Larrosa in the presence of Alfonso I of Aragon, known as Alfonso the Battler. The church measured approximately 70 metres long and 50 metres wide. It had a central nave, two aisles, three apses, and a three-aisled crypt beneath the right-side apse. Its associated buildings included a cloister, the Chapel of San Jesucristo, the cilleria or storehouse, choir stalls, and a chapel connected with the royal and episcopal palace.
The Romanesque complex suffered severe damage during the War of the Navarreria in 1276, when the cathedral precinct was looted and the earlier cloister was badly affected. A Gothic cloister and new canonical buildings were subsequently erected. On 1 July 1390, the Romanesque church collapsed around the choir. The facade and the eastern end near the altar survived, but the destruction of most of the building made reconstruction urgent. The cathedral was the setting for royal coronations, anointings, baptisms, and burials, so its rebuilding had both religious and dynastic importance.
Gothic rebuilding and royal ceremonies
Charles III of Navarre, Eleanor of Trastamara, their successors, and their daughter Blanca promoted the rebuilding. Since the chapter and bishop could not meet the full cost, Navarrese monarchs contributed portions of their revenues over successive years. The foundation stone of the present church was laid on 27 May 1394. An inscription beneath a relief on the second pillar of the central nave records the date and shows three canons kneeling before a seated Virgin.
Construction proceeded in two principal stages, from 1394 to 1451 and from 1472 to 1501. The resulting church reflects French Gothic traditions associated with Navarre’s connections to the dynasties of Champagne and Evreux. The wider cathedral complex continued to develop through Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical phases. The Gothic church and cloister were built chiefly between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, while the western facade was replaced at the end of the eighteenth century.
Pamplona Cathedral remained closely associated with the monarchy of Navarre. The first recorded monarch anointed at the Pamplona see was García Sánchez III, known as García of Najera, in the eleventh century. The last proclamation of a Navarrese king there was that of Fernando III of Navarre, also identified as Fernando VII of Spain, in 1815. Under Charles III, the coronation ceremony reached its greatest elaboration. Nobles raised the monarch on a large shield, or pavis, while those present acclaimed, “Real, real, real!”
The cathedral’s continuing ceremonial calendar includes the Assumption festival on 15 August, Corpus Christi processions, Holy Week rites, the Christmas-eve proclamation of the Kalenda, the procession of the Three Kings through the cloister, the three-hour sermon of the Seven Words on Good Friday, the Easter Encounter procession, and the reception of the angel of Saint Michael of Aralar. The original title was Santa Maria of Pamplona, while the formal dedication is Santa Maria of the Assumption. The popular name Santa Maria la Real became widespread after the canonical coronation of the image on 21 September 1946, rather than representing the historically documented original title.
Later damage, alteration, and preservation
The complex suffered further damage from a gunpowder-mill explosion in 1733. Most of the stained glass was destroyed, while tracery, pinnacles, doors, and other fittings were damaged. A second explosion in 1756 probably destroyed many of the remaining exterior pinnacles. Between 1744 and 1746, the Beneficiaries’ Sacristy was built after a house and an earlier funerary area were removed. The tomb and epitaph of Bishop Toribio de Mier, who had been buried there in 1698, were moved to the adjoining passage.
A new chapter house was constructed in 1724 and formally opened on 17 October 1727. It was redecorated in the Rococo style in 1765. The chapter also ordered a large library in 1760. Its library and archive preserve 135 codices, 141 incunabula, more than 15,000 older and historical volumes, and a further 8,000 volumes from a previous archive library. The oldest recorded document dates from 829 and is preserved in the thirteenth-century Round Book.
The old Romanesque facade was dismantled in the eighteenth century. Ventura Rodriguez prepared the surviving design in 1783, and Santos Angel de Ochandategui carried it out after the chapter approved the project in 1782. Construction was completed in the early nineteenth century. The Neoclassical facade retained the principal lighting openings and later served as a model for the facade of San Cristobal Cathedral in La Laguna, Tenerife, built in 1820.
The French siege of Pamplona in 1823 caused bomb damage to the southern transept and part of the cloister, which was completely rebuilt in the affected section. The chapter’s communal way of life continued until 1860, preserving the dormitory and other canonical rooms. After communal life ended, the refectory lost its original function and was later converted into a chapel. The Diocesan Cathedral Museum opened in 1960 in former canonical rooms and preserves sculpture, painting, metalwork, ivory carvings, documents, textiles, and other liturgical and artistic objects from the cathedral and churches of Navarre.
Twentieth-century changes reorganized the presbytery, moved the choir, removed the former main altarpiece, created the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in the southern transept, relocated the choir screen, and replaced the former Baroque organ. The restoration of 1992 to 1994 included cleaning, structural consolidation, archaeological excavation throughout the church, restoration of furniture and altarpieces, electrical work, and new lighting. It also revealed medieval polychromy on vault keys, capitals, chapels, and the presbytery.
Archaeological work in the 1990s exposed the foundations and crypt of the Romanesque cathedral. It also recovered a lead urn containing a wooden box with the remains of Magdalena of Valois, sister of Louis XI of France and mother of Catherine of Foix, the last queen of Navarre. Pamplona Cathedral is recognized as a Spanish Historic Heritage monument and forms an associated element of the UNESCO World Heritage property “Routes of Santiago de Compostela: French Way and Routes of Northern Spain.”
Remains
The cathedral complex preserves an unusually complete group of buildings organized around the church and cloister. Alongside the Gothic cathedral are the cloister, sacristies, refectory, kitchen, chapter house, dormitory, cilleria, Chapel of San Jesucristo, library, and other rooms associated with the communal life of the chapter. Beneath and around the present buildings, archaeological remains preserve evidence of the Romanesque cathedral and earlier occupation.
The Gothic church
The present church has a Latin-cross plan with a nave, transept, presbytery, and ambulatory, a passage curving around the sanctuary and giving access to chapels. Its interior covers approximately 2,630 square metres. The nave contains one central and two lateral aisles, each divided into six bays. The central nave is 12.2 metres wide and 25.3 metres high, while the lateral aisles are 7 metres wide and 12.8 metres high. The westernmost bay was built together with the late-eighteenth-century Neoclassical facade.
Chapels line the lateral aisles. Most occupy a single bay, while the two nearest the western facade extend across two bays. The main piers are freestanding rhomboidal supports composed of twelve slender colonnettes separated by concave mouldings. They carry the transverse and longitudinal arches and the diagonal ribs. Pointed rib vaults cover the central and lateral aisles. The central nave has one simple oblong vault per bay, separated by transverse arches and reinforced by longitudinal ligatures. Vault keys and nearby shields retain heraldic and polychrome decoration associated with Charles III, Queen Blanca, Navarre-Evreux, and Bishop Martin de Peralta. The sixth bay received a modern reconstruction during the 1992 to 1994 restoration.
Polychromy extends approximately four metres around some central-nave vault keys, covering sections of the vault as well as the keys and shields. The lateral-aisle vaults follow a similar structure but lack the longitudinal ligatures. Pointed windows occur twice in each bay, alternating larger and smaller openings. Their tracery uses intersecting pointed arches and quadrilobes in the odd bays, and large circles containing curved-sided squares and quadrilobes in the even bays. Smaller chapel windows generally have a single mullion. The roofs of the aisles and chapels rise about halfway up the central-nave walls, restricting the height of the windows and leaving a strong emphasis on wall surface.
Transept and sanctuary
The square transept has two bays in each arm. Its vault rises to the same height as that of the central nave and rests on piers with sixteen colonnettes. Pointed windows with Flamboyant tracery and small rose windows light the gables. The presbytery forms an irregular pentagon at the eastern end. It opens toward the nave and transept through a broad pointed arch and toward the ambulatory through four smaller pointed arches supported by three circular columns. The ambulatory has four bays, comprising two regular central hexagons and two unequal irregular pentagons.
Two richly decorated Gothic doorways connect the ambulatory with the sacristies. Their pointed arches carry naturalistic foliage, crockets, finials, and canopied details. They may originally have been intended as funerary niches before being adapted as entrances. The Gothic Door of Saint Joseph, built around 1425 and attributed to Jehan Lome of Tournai and his workshop, has a slightly pointed arch, figurative archivolts, a crocketed arch, finials, vegetal ornament, and a tympanum showing the Coronation of the Virgin.
Western facade and bells
The Neoclassical western facade has a tripartite arrangement, with a classical central front between two towers. The central front includes a paired tetrastyle pediment, smooth-shafted columns with Corinthian capitals, an entablature, and the chapter’s coat of arms. A recessed second level contains the central rose window and a pediment crowned by a cross, two angels, and flame finials. An altorelief of the Virgin Mary, made by Julian San Martin in 1798, forms part of the composition. Planned sculptures of Saint Peter, Saint Paul, and four Navarrese saints were never completed because of insufficient funds.
Each tower has three vertical stages. The lower stage has large windows, the middle stage has a sundial on the northern tower and a mechanical clock on the southern tower, and the upper octagonal stage contains bells, composite columns, semicircular arches, flame finials, and cylindrical upper volumes. The atrium in front of the facade has stone pillars topped with vases and joined by iron railings, designed by Santos Angel de Ochandategui.
The two towers contain eleven bronze bells. Gabriela, cast in 1519, is 1.67 metres in diameter, 1.35 metres high, and weighs more than 2,700 kilograms. After a longitudinal crack was repaired in 2010, it was moved to the southern tower in 2011. Maria measures approximately 2.5 metres in diameter and 2.25 metres high and weighs an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 kilograms. Its Latin inscription is dated 15 September 1584 and signed by Petrus de Villanueva. The bell is sounded manually by swinging its approximately 300-kilogram iron clapper and is described as the largest bell in use in Spain. Other bells include La Juana, De las Nueve, Cimbalilla, De Plata, De Parvulos, Oraciones, Santa Barbara, De Horas, and De Cuartos.
Cloister and canonical buildings
Gothic cloister
The Gothic cloister was built approximately between 1280 and 1360 over the site of a Romanesque predecessor. Its four sides form a square around an interior garden, with six bays on each side and 28 gallery bays in total, excluding an inserted lavatory. Pointed arches, three mullions, elaborate tracery, gables, buttresses, and pinnacles define the galleries. Their simple rib vaults are divided by pointed transverse arches, and most vault keys are carved and polychrome.
A fifteenth-century upper cloister was created by raising the side walls and removing the original pinnacle terminations. A light wooden floor and roof were then installed. Although this altered the earlier appearance, it helped preserve the structure. Surviving decoration includes fragments of polychromy, the Adoration of the Magi relief, the tombs of Sanchez de Asiain and the Garro family, the Amparo doorway, and a mural combining the arms of Evreux with the chains of Navarre. A blue star-vault painting also survives in one bay. Some Romanesque capitals from the earlier cloister are preserved in the Museum of Navarre.
Chapel of Barbazana
The Chapel of Barbazana stands above a crypt that compensates for the steep change in level across the site. It has a square plan, a central octagonal pier, eight arches, a four-part rib vault, and an eight-pointed star vault. Its polychrome central key depicts the Virgin. Two large elevated windows pierce the walls. Outside, the chapel resembles a four-sided prism strengthened by twelve buttresses and crowned with pyramidal pinnacles and an upper gallery of pointed arches. The interior contains the recumbent tomb figure of Bishop Arnaldo Barbazan.
Refectory and chapter house
The refectory was built between 1328 and 1335 along the south side of the cloister. The rectangular hall measures 31 metres long, 10.5 metres wide, and 13 metres high. It has a simple rib vault, five doors, eight tall narrow windows, a rose window, and a cloister entrance with a sculpted tympanum of the Last Supper. A small opening in the western wall once connected the kitchen directly with the dining hall. Juan Oliver’s former mural of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ, combined with heraldic imagery, is preserved in the Museum of Navarre; the hall itself now accommodates part of the Diocesan Museum.
The chapter house lies behind the eastern end of the church between the two sacristies, rather than inside the cloister. It is a rectangular room aligned north to south across the nave and linked to the sacristies through passage rooms. A trough-shaped vault with decorative compartments covers the interior. The Beneficiaries’ Sacristy, built between 1744 and 1746, is a large Spanish Baroque room with drawers along its long walls, a large window and church entrance in the short walls, and a barrel vault with lunettes divided by transverse arches. The Canons’ Sacristy retains a large rectangular sixteenth-century structure transformed by eighteenth-century Rococo decoration.
Cilleria, library, and Romanesque chapel
The cilleria is a narrow, elongated Romanesque building once used as a storehouse and pantry. It originally had two levels, thick rubble-stone walls, small western slit windows, and square towers at both ends. Its Romanesque doorway has a semicircular arch with three archivolts decorated with a chequer pattern, stars, and a smooth surface. The archivolts rest on columns with capitals carved with animals.
Inside the cilleria is a large helicoidal stair with a central opening nearly two metres wide. It turns through four complete revolutions and is supported only by the surrounding wall. Its balustrade has shallow Flamboyant ornament and Mudéjar ceramic elements, while the stair ends beneath a small dome with a lantern. The Chapel of San Jesucristo, also called the Chapel of Pedro de Roda, is a late-twelfth-century Romanesque building at the eastern end of the complex. It has a two-bay nave, a straight-ended apse, rib vaulting, two access doors, and a Gothic grille. Its supposed connection with a former royal and episcopal palace remains uncertain.
The chapter library was built in 1760 between the refectory and dormitory. It measures 25 metres by 8 metres and has windows along one side and two levels of wooden shelving made from timber from Roncal. The upper level has a balustraded passage and gilded Rococo decoration. Archaeological research has also identified Romanesque remains beneath the church and sacristies, together with remains of a palace on the south side of the cloister.
Altarpieces, images, and liturgical furnishings
The chapels preserve works from the Renaissance, Gothic, Baroque, and Gothic-Renaissance periods. The Chapel of Saint John the Baptist contains a Renaissance altarpiece from the second decade of the seventeenth century. The Chapel of Saint Christina holds the Gothic altarpiece of Christ of Caparroso, formed from sixteen polychrome panels dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, together with a 1.95-metre-high Crucifix. The Chapel of Saint Joseph and Saint Thomas contains an eighteenth-century Baroque altarpiece and a Crucifixion painted by Juan de Goni in 1565.
The Chapel of Saint Andrew contains a seventeenth-century reliquary altarpiece and a Baroque addition made in 1731 for the relics of Saint Columba. Matching Baroque altarpieces dedicated to Saint Jerome and Saint Gregory date from 1683. Their imagery includes Saint Jerome, Saint Gregory, Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Saturninus, Saint Fermin, Saint Fernando, Saint Francis Xavier, and the Eucharistic Pelican. The Sandoval Chapel has a 1620 altarpiece with the Fathers of the Church, Saint Benedict the Abbot, and a Calvary, as well as early sculptures of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Saint Francis Xavier, probably made soon after their canonization in 1622.
The ambulatory contains the seventeenth-century altarpiece of Saint Augustine, the Baroque altarpieces of Saint Barbara or Christ of the Chaplains and Saint Fermin from 1709, and the Gothic altarpiece of Saint Thomas from 1507. Beside it stands the small Piety altarpiece, made in 1601 by Domingo Bidarte and Juan Claver. The Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament contains the former choir grille and the Baroque altarpiece of Saint Gregory. The Chapel of Saint John the Evangelist holds a Gothic-Renaissance altarpiece from the first third of the sixteenth century, brought from Itoiz in 1929, while the Chapel of Saint Catherine contains a richly decorated Baroque altarpiece from 1683.
The former main altarpiece was a Romanist work by Pedro Gonzalez de San Pedro, a pupil of Juan de Anchieta. It was removed during the reorganization of 1940 and transferred to the Church of San Miguel in Pamplona, where it was installed in a building completed in 1954. The choir stalls were made between 1539 and 1541 under Esteban de Obray, with important carvings attributed to Guillén of Holland. Their original U-shaped arrangement had 59 high stalls and 45 low seats. In 1946, the choir was moved to the presbytery and reduced in size. Twelve high stalls and eight low stalls are preserved in the Museum of Navarre, one high stall was given to the Nunciature in Madrid, and the presbytery now contains 33 high stalls, three seats for the prior and ministers, and 23 low stalls.
The Gothic grille closing the presbytery was completed in 1517 by Guillermo de Ervenant. The Plateresque grille of the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament was made around 1539 to 1540 and is attributed to Esteban de Obray. A Romanesque-style grille survives around the cloister lavatory. Tradition connects its iron with chains cut by Sancho the Strong at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212, although that association is uncertain.
Images, treasury, and burials
The principal Marian image, Santa Maria la Real, is a seated Romanesque sculpture dating approximately from 1175 to 1185. It is 93 centimetres high and shows Mary enthroned with the Christ Child on her left leg. The sculpture was originally covered with silver except on the face and hands and was commissioned by Charles II in the fourteenth century. The crowns of the Virgin and Child were made in the eighteenth century and altered in 1946.
The treasury includes Gothic reliquaries of the Holy Sepulchre and the True Cross, a Renaissance silver monstrance, a Renaissance silver-gilt Gospel book containing a medieval parchment codex with Gospels dated 1228, a sixteenth-century reliquary of Saint Ursula, processional crosses, chalices, trays, candlesticks, embroidered vestments, and altar frontals. The Holy Sepulchre reliquary is a Parisian Gothic work of gilt silver and copper with opaque enamels. It measures 88 by 38.5 by 24.5 centimetres and takes the form of an open shrine on four lion feet, with arches, rose windows, a gabled roof, and a scene of the Three Marys before the tomb.
The True Cross reliquary, measuring 65 by 40 by 30 centimetres, is apparently of Parisian origin. Made of gilt silver with translucent enamels, it contains scenes of the Passion, figures of Saints Peter and Paul, and relics of the True Cross and Christ’s tunic added in 1401. Two of its three original crowning crosses were lost after a twentieth-century theft and replaced by modern reconstructions. The Renaissance monstrance was made in Pamplona around 1540 to 1550. This Plateresque shrine measures 84 by 42 by 37 centimetres and bears the mark “PPLON.” A silver processional shrine made in 1596 on the order of Bishop Antonio Zapata measures 200 by 92 by 92 centimetres. It was intended for the main altarpiece and Corpus Christi processions; a wooden carriage made in 2006 allowed it to return to procession after a period of disuse.
Royal and episcopal tombs
The dual tomb of Charles III and Eleanor of Trastamara stands in the centre of the second bay of the central nave. Its dark marble tomb chest measures 2.73 metres long, 2.12 metres wide, and 1.08 metres high. The recumbent royal figures, architectural canopy, and 28 mourning figures are carved in alabaster. Traces of original polychromy and gilding remain on the figures. Charles has a lion at his feet, while Eleanor is accompanied by two dogs. Both wear open bronze crowns that originally included pearl ornaments.
Jehan Lome of Tournai and his workshop made the tomb between 1413 and 1419. It was produced during Charles III’s lifetime, while Eleanor had died in 1416, making the king’s figure the more secure portrait. The Chapel of Saint John the Evangelist contains the tomb of Bishop Sancho Sanchez de Oteiza, probably made by the same workshop. The cloister contains the 1370 tomb of Bishop Sanchez de Asiain, whose niche formerly held a polychrome mural now preserved in the Museum of Navarre. Other funerary monuments are associated with the Garro family, Bishop Arnaldo Barbazan, Thierry Dumont, Count of Gages and viceroy of Navarre, and the military leader Francisco Espoz y Mina.
The Barbazana crypt contains episcopal burial niches. Beneath the tomb of Charles III, a vaulted chamber holds boxes containing the remains of Navarrese monarchs, their consorts, and their children. The complex also contains royal, episcopal, canonical, aristocratic, and common burials. Medieval burial continued until the early nineteenth century, and burial within the cathedral was restored in 2010. The cloister floor contains 328 graves, and the former cemetery was adapted for columbaria containing cremated remains.
Windows, organs, and carved decoration
Only four original sixteenth-century stained-glass panels survive. Most of the present glazing dates from the twentieth century. The central-nave windows were made between 1919 and 1937 by the Maumejean workshop of San Sebastian. Carlos Munoz de Pablos later glazed the presbytery, transept, ambulatory, and the area above the cloister entrance. The refectory glazing was made in 1891 by the Mayer workshop of Munich, and the Chapel of Barbazana received glazing by S. Cuadrado of Madrid in 1956.
The main organ is a 1946 electric instrument by Organeria Espanola, with three keyboards, 34 stops, and hundreds of pipes. It stands above the Door of Saint Joseph in the northern transept and incorporates pipes from a Baroque-Romantic organ of 1607 that was rebuilt in 1657 and 1684. A small Baroque organ designed and assembled by Walter Chinaglia was installed in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament in 2008. A life-size medieval-style organ was made in 2006 from a fourteenth-century cloister relief by Jacques Perut.
The cathedral retains an eighteenth-century wooden carraca, a clapper instrument used during Holy Week instead of bells. It has circular sides, four blades, and five hammers per blade. The original was restored in 2005, and a replica was made in 2010. Decorative carving appears throughout the complex on capitals, corbels, vault keys, doors, and other architectural members. Interior capitals are chiefly vegetal, while corbels often show human or animal figures. In the cloister, earlier capitals favour narrative imagery, while later work uses more vegetal ornament.
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