Church of San Francisco, Castro
Iglesia de San Francisco
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The original design called for statues on the towers, but the idea was dropped after a storm toppled some of them.
- The church is 54 metres long and 25 metres wide, with a central nave 16 metres high beneath its wooden vault.
- Each of the two towers, about five metres square, holds a single bell weighing roughly 875 kilograms.
- The raulí wood used for the interior was brought over from the Chilean mainland rather than cut on the island.
- Castro is Chile's third-oldest city in continuous existence, founded as Santiago de Castro on the orders of the governor Rodrigo de Quiroga.
- Franciscan friars from Chillán and from the Ocopa convent in Peru settled at the church in the late 18th century.
- The building covers about 1,404 square metres, with galleries three metres wide running along both sides of the nave.
Why it is worth it
The Church of San Francisco fills one side of the Plaza de Armas in Castro, the capital of Chiloé, and it is impossible to miss: a neo-Gothic church with two 42-metre towers, a 32-metre dome over the sanctuary and a facade that is usually painted in bright colours. It is often called a cathedral, wrongly, since the diocese is based in Ancud, and it is also known as the Church of the Apostle Santiago. Castro itself is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Chile, founded by Martín Ruiz de Gamboa in 1567, and a church to Saint James was built here in the same year. Its successors burned or were rebuilt several times; fires in 1857 and 1902 destroyed the two churches before the present one.
This building is the odd one out among the sixteen Chiloé churches on the UNESCO list. The others follow the island's own school of wooden architecture; San Francisco was designed by the Italian architect Eduardo Provasoli in a Gothic Revival idiom and built between 1910 and 1912 under the direction of the friar Ángel Custodio Subiabre. Chilote carpenters led by Salvador Sierpe raised it in native timber such as alerce, Guaitecas cypress and coigüe, with interiors of raulí and olivillo, and then sheathed the exterior and roof in galvanised iron. During construction, in August 1911, a storm brought the unfinished structure down and it had to be started again.
Inside, the wood of the vaults and galleries is the main attraction, together with six side altars that include a figure of Saint Michael triumphing over the devil and a copy of the Nazarene of Caguach. The church became a national monument in 1979 and part of the World Heritage Site in 2000. In the 2010s a large shopping mall built nearby drew a warning from UNESCO that the site could be placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger unless the mall's height and bulk were reduced, a reminder of how fragile the setting of these churches is.
Getting there
The church is on the Plaza de Armas, the main square of Castro. Mocopulli Airport (MHC), about 6 km northwest of Dalcahue, is the island's airport and serves Castro with domestic flights; the larger El Tepual Airport (PMC) at Puerto Montt is roughly 128 km away. By road, Route 5 reaches Chiloé from the mainland by ferry across the Chacao Channel, where a bridge is under construction. Castro's bus terminal is close to the square.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Church of San Francisco, located on one side of the Plaza de Armas of Castro, Chile, is the main Catholic church of Chiloé's capital. This 1912 building has a surface area of 1,404 m2, a width of 52 m and a height of 27 m. The dome above the church's presbytery is 32 m high and the height of its towers is 42 m. The church is also known as the Iglesia Apóstol Santiago and erroneously as the “cathedral”, which is actually to be found in Ancud, headquarters of the diocese of the same name. The Church of San Francisco does, however, lead one of the 24 parishes that form this diocese.
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