Guadalajara Cathedral: its famous yellow-tiled spires replaced towers an 1818 earthquake brought down

On the Plaza de Armas, in the historic center of Guadalajara, Mexico, the cathedral stands where a small adobe church dedicated to the Archangel Michael previously stood, destroyed by a fire on 30 May 1574. Philip II authorized the construction of the new cathedral by royal decree of 18 May 1561, and the foundation stone was blessed on 31 July of the same year by Bishop Pedro de Ayala. The actual work, however, began only in 1571, with the architect Martín Casillas responsible, from 1593, for the vaults and the roof. The building was completed in February 1618, but the formal consecration, with the dedication to the Assumption of Mary, took place only in October 1716, with sources disagreeing on the exact day, given variously as 12 or 22 October. On the night of 31 May 1818, an earthquake brought down the original towers and dome. The current twin neo-Gothic spires, covered in yellow and blue majolica tiles produced at Sayula, in the same state of Jalisco, were built between 1851 and 1854 by the architect Manuel Gómez Ibarra on the commission of Bishop Diego Aranda y Carpinteiro, using pumice stone to reduce their weight as an earthquake-resistant measure. A local legend, explicitly presented as such by the sources, tells that Bishop Aranda was inspired by the motif of two towers painted on the bottom of an English ceramic plate; the historian José Cornejo Franco instead proposed, in a study of his, a stylistic comparison with the towers of Bayeux Cathedral, in Normandy, without this implying a direct design link. A further earthquake, in 1875, damaged the dome of the choir, later rebuilt by the engineer Domingo Torres. In the sacristy is a painting, “La Purísima Concepción”, long attributed on a traditional basis to Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, although no source consulted confirms this attribution with a technical or connoisseurship study; this painting is to be distinguished from a different cycle of eleven canvases once attributed to Murillo, today kept at the Museo Regional de Guadalajara, whose attribution has instead been explicitly rejected by the most recent research, which assigns them to an anonymous Sevillian workshop. Also in the sacristy is kept the Baroque painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando, “La Iglesia Militante y Triunfante” (1687). In the crypt beneath the choir rest three cardinals, among them Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, assassinated in 1993 at Guadalajara airport. Contrary to what is sometimes repeated, neither the cathedral nor the historic center of Guadalajara appears on the UNESCO World Heritage List, which for the city includes only the Hospicio Cabañas, a separate building located elsewhere. On 30 January 1979, during his first trip to Mexico, Pope John Paul II visited the cathedral, meeting the cloistered nuns of the city; he does not appear to have returned to the building on his subsequent Mexican trips.