Miraflores Charterhouse, Burgos

The Cartuja de Miraflores sits among trees on a low hill east of Burgos, and from outside it gives little away: a plain monastic enclosure and a church whose west front, in the late-Gothic Isabelline manner, carries the carved coats of arms of its royal founders. Inside that church is one of the most concentrated displays of late-15th-century sculpture in Spain, made for a single purpose, to bury a king.

The site began as a hunting lodge built in 1401 by Henry III of Castile. His son, John II, gave it to the Carthusians in 1442 to honour his father's will, but fire destroyed the building in 1452, and a new monastery was begun in 1454 under Juan de Colonia, the German-born master then also working on Burgos Cathedral. After a pause, John II's daughter Isabella I revived the project from 1477; the vaults were closed in 1484 under Simón de Colonia, Juan's son, and in the 1530s Diego de Mendieta added side chapels, raised the church and gave it its spires, pinnacles and cresting. Inside is a single nave under a star-patterned vault, ending in a polygonal apse.

Isabella turned the church into a mausoleum for her parents and her brother, and the commissions went to Gil de Siloé. In the centre of the nave lies the alabaster tomb of John II and Isabella of Portugal, laid out as an eight-pointed star formed by overlapping a square and a diamond, so crowded with figures, canopies and foliage that it rewards slow circling. Set into the wall on the Gospel side is the alabaster tomb of the Infante Alfonso, Isabella's younger brother, who died in 1468 at fourteen and whose remains were laid here near his father. Behind them rises Siloé's high altarpiece, carved in wood between 1496 and 1499 and painted and gilded by Diego de la Cruz; tradition holds that the gold came from the first shipments brought back from the Americas. Its centrepiece is a great wheel of angels framing the crucified Christ, with God the Father and the Holy Spirit supporting the arms of the cross.

Miraflores is still a working Carthusian monastery, home to a community of monks of the order, so the enclosure and cloisters remain private and visitors see the church and its exhibition spaces. It was declared a National Monument in 1923.

Getting there

The charterhouse stands about 3 km east of central Burgos, in the Fuentes Blancas park near the Arlanzón river, and can be reached on foot along a riverside path through green surroundings, by city bus or by taxi; there is free parking for cars and coaches. The Gamonal district of Burgos is about 2.5 km away. The nearest major airport is Vitoria (VIT), about 100 km to the north-east.