Toledo Cathedral: begun in 1226 over a mosque, and still singing every morning the Mozarabic rite Cisneros saved

The primatial cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo is the seat of the primate of Spain and one of the great masterpieces of European Gothic. It was begun in 1226. Some sources say 1227, but the cathedral itself celebrates in 2026 the eighth centenary, counting from 1226. The work began under Ferdinand III the Saint and Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, on the foundations of the ancient Visigothic basilica of Saint Mary, which in Muslim times had been turned into the great mosque of the city. The layering of the three religions of Toledo, Jewish, Christian and Islamic, is here literally in the foundations, and the official UNESCO description makes it plain. The work closed in 1493, when the last bays of the central nave were vaulted, after generations of masters had worked on it: a French «master Martín» by tradition, then Petrus Petri, and later Alvar Martínez, Hanequin of Brussels, Enrique Egas, Covarrubias. The result was a Gothic of French inspiration bent to Castilian light: a plan of five naves, a wide transept, an ambulatory and radial chapels, about 120 metres long and some sixty wide. The single tower, 92 metres high, was raised between 1380 and 1422 in Toledan Gothic with mudéjar grafts and crowned by a pyramidal iron spire. The opposite side of the front is closed by the dome of the Mozarabic Chapel, which Jorge Manuel Theotocópuli, son of El Greco, rebuilt after the fire of the lantern in 1622, completing the whole in 1631. That chapel holds what makes Toledo unique: in 1504 Cardinal Cisneros set it aside to perpetuate the Hispano-Mozarabic rite, and a Mass in that ancient liturgy is still celebrated there every morning. Behind the high altar opens El Transparente by Narciso Tomé, finished in 1732: to light it, the sculptor pierced the vault of the ambulatory so that a ray of sun would fall from above onto the Sagrario, «an explosion of marble, bronze, stucco and light», as the cathedral itself puts it. The sacristy is a picture gallery: beneath the ceiling fresco by Luca Giordano and facing the Espolio of El Greco, Titian, Caravaggio, Van Dyck and Goya are in conversation. In the choir, the lower stalls were carved by Rodrigo Alemán between 1489 and 1495 with scenes of the conquest of Granada, the upper ones by Felipe Bigarny and Alonso Berruguete. And there is the Custodia of Enrique de Arfe, a processional monstrance of almost 200 kilos of gilded silver and more than three metres high, commissioned by Cardinal Cisneros and finished in 1524, which goes out every year in the Corpus Domini procession. From the tower hangs the Campana Gorda, cast in 1753 and cracked at its first stroke. The cathedral is not inscribed on the UNESCO list on its own: it is the keystone monument of the Historic City of Toledo, inscribed in 1986 under criteria (i), (ii), (iii) and (iv).