Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela

The belief that Saint James the Greater had been buried in the far north-west of Iberia spread there in the late seventh century, and was taken up in the treatise De Ortu et Obitu Patrum attributed to Isidore of Seville and, in England, by Bishop Aldhelm of Malmesbury. The discovery of the grave itself is placed in 813 or 814, with some written accounts giving 820. A hermit named Pelagius, with others, saw lights near a place called Solovio and reported them to Theodomirus, bishop of Iria Flavia, the modern Padrón. After three days of fasting the bishop went to the spot and found among the scrub a monument built of marble slabs, which he took without hesitation for the tomb of the apostle and of his two disciples, Athanasius and Theodore. It lay inside the burial ground of a small abandoned Roman settlement.

Theodomirus reported the find to Alfonso II of Asturias, who travelled there with his court, granted the bishop the lands around the sepulchre and their revenues, and ordered a small church raised supra corpus apostoli, over the body of the apostle, alongside a baptistery and a second church dedicated to the Saviour. A document dated 4 September 834 records the king's own words on it. Tradition makes Alfonso the first pilgrim to the shrine, though no written proof of that survives. The chapel was replaced by a church in 829 and then, under Alfonso III, by a larger pre-Romanesque building of three naves, put up because the earlier one was too small for the numbers arriving. The graves of James and his disciples were left untouched and the old church was kept whole inside the presbytery. The consecration in May 899 was attended by the royal family, seventeen bishops, fourteen nobles and other dignitaries, and the parchment deed of Alfonso III's donation is still held by the cathedral.

In the summer of 997 Compostela was attacked by Almanzor, the effective ruler of the Caliphate of Córdoba and commander of its army. Bishop Pedro de Mezonzo, fearing his intentions, evacuated the city; Almanzor's forces burned the pre-Romanesque church but left the sepulchre alone, and that allowed the pilgrimage to continue. The bishop began rebuilding around the year 1000. The doors and the bells of the burned church were carried on the shoulders of Christian captives to Córdoba and set into the Aljama mosque. When Ferdinand III of Castile took Córdoba in 1236, those same doors and bells were carried by Muslim captives to Toledo and installed in the cathedral of Saint Mary there.

Work on the present cathedral began in 1075 under Alfonso VI of Castile and the patronage of Bishop Diego Peláez, the tenth-century church having again proved too small for the flow of people walking to Compostela from across Europe. The Codex Calixtinus names the masters as Bernard the Elder, called a wonderful master, and his assistant Robertus Galperinus, working with some fifty stonecutters; the plan followed that of the monastic church of Saint-Sernin in Toulouse, and the fabric was granite. The city became an episcopal see the same year and the church its cathedral. It is the largest Romanesque church in Spain. Peláez was deposed in 1088 and the works stopped for a time.

Five years later they were moving again under Diego Gelmírez, the newly appointed administrator of the diocese, with the support of the new bishop Dalmacio and of Raymond of Burgundy. Master Esteban left Compostela in 1101 with the ambulatory chapels finished and the Pratarías façade begun on the south side of the transept, the only Romanesque façade the building still keeps. The arms of the transept were completed in 1111 and, on the evidence of the Codex Calixtinus, the last stone was laid in 1122. Gelmírez, bishop from 1100 and first archbishop of Compostela from 1120, when Pope Callixtus II raised the see, was the figure who drove the building on; the sheer quantity of alms gathered made it possible to return the church to worship and consecrate it in 1128.

Six bays of the naves had been vaulted by 1140. In 1168 the chapter commissioned Master Mateo to build the western end, now the crypt and the Pórtico da Gloria, a Romanesque portico ordered by King Ferdinand II of León; its completion in 1188 was cut into a stone set in the cathedral, though the full three-part set took until 1211 to finish and the towers of that western block were never completed. On a Thursday in the second week of Easter, in April 1211, Archbishop Pedro Muñiz consecrated the cathedral before Alfonso IX of León, the king's son and a body of church and civil authorities. Mateo left his own kneeling figure at the foot of the central column holding a sign reading Architectus; known as the Santo dos Croques, it drew an old student practice of knocking one's head against it for wisdom, later taken up by pilgrims, and access to it is now being limited to stop further damage.

News of the find travelled quickly through Christian Europe from about 813, and pilgrims began arriving at the place called Campus Stellae, traditionally taken as the origin of the name Compostela, where a convent and a number of lodging houses grew up. In 850 Gotescalco, the French bishop of Le Puy-en-Velay, made the journey to the tomb and is counted the first documented foreign pilgrim. Clergy attached to the order of Cluny compiled the Codex Calixtinus and the Historia compostelana for Archbishop Gelmírez, and the peninsular kings backed a network of Cluniac monasteries across the north and especially along the roads to Santiago.

A privilege granted by Pope Callixtus II in 1122 made every year in which 25 July, the feast of Saint James, fell on a Sunday a Holy Year at Compostela, when the same graces could be won at the cathedral as were given at Rome in its jubilee years. The oldest surviving bull of concession is the Regis aeterni of 1179, in which Alexander III confirmed it. In a Holy Year pilgrims may enter by the Porta Santa, kept shut behind a fence at all other times, and gain a plenary indulgence; in the Middle Ages the Compostela certificate halved the time a soul spent in purgatory, and carried the full indulgence when it had been earned in a Holy Year.

The fourteenth century turned much of the traffic away. Upheaval across Europe diverted pilgrimage to other destinations, the Reconquista pulled the economic and governmental attention of the Spanish kingdoms southwards, and the Western Schism of 1378 divided Christendom. The fifteenth century brought war, hunger, plague and failed harvests and did nothing to revive it. Believers from across Europe kept coming to the apostle's tomb to complete their penance through all of it.

Louis XI of France gave the two largest of the cathedral's thirteen bells in 1483, and a university was added to the city in 1495. The towers of the main west front had been begun in the twelfth century and altered in the fifteenth; when a tilt was detected in their structure between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they had to be strengthened with buttresses. José de la Peña de Toro built the bell stages in baroque style between 1667 and 1670 and Domingo de Andrade completed them. Andrade also raised the clock tower, the Torre da Trindade or Berenguela, by two storeys between 1676 and 1680, finishing it with a pyramid-shaped crown and a lantern. Work on that tower was traditionally held to have begun in 1316 at the request of Archbishop Rodrigo del Padrón as a defence tower and to have been carried on after his death by his successor, Bérenger de Landore, though some writers question those dates.

On the east side, the Porta Real was begun in 1666 under José de Vega y Verdugo and José de la Peña de Toro and completed in 1700 by Domingo de Andrade; the kings of Spain entered the cathedral through it, which is how it got its name, and the royal arms sit on its lintel. Fernando de Casas Novoa completed the baroque Obradoiro façade in 1740, glazing it with large windows so that light still reaches the Romanesque portal behind, and in 1738 designed the north tower, the Torre da Carraca, in imitation of the seventeenth-century work beside it. The Romanesque portal of the north front, built in 1122 by Bernardo, treasurer of the church, was demolished after a fire in 1758, and the sculpture that could be saved was moved to the Pratarías façade; the replacement, begun in baroque by Lucas Ferro Caaveiro, was finished in neoclassical style by Domingo Lois Monteagudo and Clemente Fernández Sarela in 1769. In 1833 Andrés Antelo fitted a clock to each face of the Berenguela for Archbishop Rafael de Vélez.

For fear of English raiding, and of Francis Drake in particular, who had threatened Compostela after landing at La Coruña in 1589, Archbishop Juan de Sanclemente had the relics moved that same year from beneath the high altar and hidden in the floor of the apse. The place was gradually forgotten. In January 1879 Cardinal Miguel Payá y Rico ordered the search resumed, and excavations in the apse produced an urn containing bones; digging under the apse in the same year, directed by the historian López Ferreiro, also uncovered the foundations of the primitive sepulchre, the arca marmarica, with the remains of an altar. After examination by the university in Compostela the Holy See opened a process that ended in Leo XIII's authentication of the relics in the bull Deus Omnipotens in 1884. A silver urn to José Losada's design was made in 1886 and placed on a marble altar in the crypt. The authenticity has been doubted on various occasions since, among others by the historian Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz.

Traditional accounts have the Way falling into neglect through the early modern centuries, but the travel writing left by the many who walked it shows Santiago holding its place as an international devotional destination at least into the nineteenth century, before the pilgrimage became a much more local phenomenon in the first decades of the twentieth. From the 1950s, with the mobility that new transport brought, the city became a significant destination for Spanish domestic tourism. The Holy Year of 1954 was given special treatment and an international push, consolidated in the celebration of 1965 under the tourist administrations of the Spain of the day, with touring maps printed so the route could be driven, the first Jacobean associations forming in Europe and research into the historic roads encouraged. From the Holy Year of 1993 the Galician government promoted the Camino as a tourist resource aimed at the traditional religious pilgrim, launching the Xacobeo 93 campaign and restoring stretches of the route and its pilgrim infrastructure with the co-operation of the regions it crosses. Pilgrims reaching the cathedral present a credential showing where they have walked and lodged; the Compostela certificate requires at least a hundred kilometres on foot, or two hundred by bicycle or on horseback.

The cathedral was declared a bien de interés cultural in 1896. The old city around it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1985 and the Camino in 1993, and when the Spanish inscription was extended in 2015 to the Routes of Santiago de Compostela, covering the French Way and the northern routes, the cathedral was listed among the individual assets. It belongs to the Metropolitan Archdiocese of Santiago de Compostela and remains the traditional end of the Way of St James. In a Holy Year the lantern of the Berenguela is kept lit right through the year, working as a lighthouse to guide pilgrims in, and the Botafumeiro, the censer the goldsmith José Losada made in 1851, is loaded with 40 kg of charcoal and incense and swung by eight red-robed tiraboleiros almost to the roof of the transept at the pilgrims' masses.