Morelia Cathedral: the pink-stone colossus whose silver font baptized both a hero and an emperor of Mexico’s independence

The foundation stone of Morelia Cathedral was laid on 6 August 1660, the feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, to which the building is dedicated, by Bishop Marcos Ramírez de Prado. Some English-language sources give 6 May instead, but the official entry of the Mexican Sistema de Información Cultural and the coincidence with the titular feast make the August date the reliable one. The building replaced the earlier cathedral of what was then Valladolid, inaugurated in 1580 and later, according to the same official entry, damaged by fire. The design is attributed to the Italian architect Vicencio Barroso de la Escayola, whose name is spelled very differently across the sources, which also write «Vicenzo Barroccio»; he directed the works until his death in 1692. Regional histories record a first opening for worship in 1705, with the building still unfinished. The completion of towers and façades came only in 1744, the date carved on the crowning of the main façade, after 84 years of work. INAH reports that experts consider the building the finest example of «barroco tablereado», the «panelled» Baroque, while the interior, in sober Doric order with neoclassical altarpieces, belongs to a later season. The pink cantera towers reach 66.8 metres, crosses included. On their position in the ranking of Mexico’s tallest the sources do not agree, fourth for some, seventh for others, so here only the height is given. A local tradition, presented as such by the sources, holds that the two crowning crosses, one of iron, one of stone, represent the divine and the human nature of Christ. Inside are kept an eighteenth-century silver manifestador 3.19 metres high, with 29 statuettes and 42 gilded reliefs; the Señor de la Sacristía, a sixteenth-century Christ made of corn-cane paste in the indigenous pre-Hispanic technique; and the neoclassical silver baptismal font in which, as INAH recalls, both José María Morelos and Agustín de Iturbide were baptised, the priest-hero of Mexican independence and its first emperor. The monumental organ «San Gregorio Magno», built by E. F. Walcker & Co. of Ludwigsburg with 4,600 pipes, was inaugurated around 1905, the sources ranging between 1905 and 1907, and according to its own builder was at the time the largest in Latin America, a period claim reported here as such. Since 1966 it has been the heart of the international organ festival «Alfonso Vega Núñez». Every Saturday evening, with the «Encendido de Catedral», the façade goes dark and lights up again progressively amid music and fireworks, a free show documented by the federal culture portal. The cathedral is not individually inscribed on the World Heritage List: it is, however, the keystone monument of the Historic Centre of Morelia, inscribed in 1991 under criteria (ii), (iv) and (vi), whose towers, in the official description, «dominate the city».