Catedral de Girona
Cathedral · Girona
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Girona's cathedral rises above a Baroque staircase of ninety steps, built between 1690 and 1694 by master builder Pere Casas. Inside, a single Gothic nave spans 22.98 metres, the widest of any Gothic church and second in the world only to St Peter's Basilica. The facade itself, begun in 1680, took until 1733 to complete. Game of Thrones filmed its Great Sept of Baelor scenes on these same stairs.
Behind the facade lies the outcome of a dispute that ran three decades. When masons proposed spanning the Gothic choir with one wide vault instead of the customary three naves, master builders from Barcelona argued the span was too dangerous to build. A congress of twelve experts convened in 1416, and Bishop Dalmau de Mur ratified the single-nave design the following year on the advice of master builder Guillem Bofill. Construction ran until 1604, interrupted for about a decade during the Catalan Civil War. Of the Romanesque cathedral the Gothic nave replaced, only the cloister and the bell tower known as the Torre de Carlemany survive, the tower built into the new structure as a buttress. The cloister's capitals, carved through the 12th century, show fantastic creatures and vegetation alongside scenes from the New Testament.
What you see
Inside, the single Gothic vault runs the full length of the nave, wide enough that no column breaks the sightline from the doors to the altar.
cathedralgothic architecturefilm locationromanesque cloister