Palma Cathedral

Seen from the water, La Seu seems to grow straight out of Palma's old sea wall: a cliff of golden sandstone buttresses standing between the royal palace of La Almudaina and the bishop's palace. It is one of the most theatrical waterfront silhouettes in the Mediterranean, and it was meant to be. After James I of Aragon took Mallorca from its Muslim rulers in 1229, the city's great mosque was replaced by a church dedicated to Santa Maria, and the Gothic cathedral that followed took 372 years, not reaching completion until 1601.

The building has three parallel naves and no transept, so the interior opens as a single vast hall. The central nave rises to about 44 metres, among the highest of any church in the world, carried on remarkably slender piers. Light is the real material here. The great rose window over the high altar, nearly 14 metres across, is the second-largest Gothic rose anywhere, and on bright mornings its coloured glass throws patches of red, blue and gold across the stone. Twice a year, on 2 February and 11 November, the early sun shines through the great rose and projects its image onto the inner wall just beneath the rose of the main façade, so for a few minutes the two circles hang one above the other like a figure of eight.

Two modern interventions make La Seu unlike any other medieval cathedral. Between 1903 and 1914 Antoni Gaudí reworked the interior, moving the choir stalls from the middle of the nave to the walls of the presbytery to open the space to the congregation, and hanging an enormous, crown-like canopy above the altar, trimmed with lamps and fabric. The changes were controversial, and parts remain unfinished, which only adds to their strange charm. Nearly a century later, between 2001 and 2006, the Mallorcan artist Miquel Barceló covered the chapel of Sant Pere in a cave-like skin of glazed ceramic, where fish, fruit, loaves and skulls surface from the clay in a retelling of the multiplication of loaves and fishes, lit through grey-toned stained glass.

Walk around the outside too: from the waterfront below, the flying buttresses march in ranks along the flank of the church, and the whole mass reads as one of the finest Gothic profiles in Spain.

Getting there

The cathedral is in the historic centre of Palma, beside the Almudaina palace and on the seafront. Palma de Mallorca Airport (PMI) is about 8 km away, with buses and taxis into the city.