Seville Cathedral

In 1172 the Almohad caliph Abu Yaqub Yusuf ordered a new congregational mosque at the southern end of Seville, replacing the ninth-century mosque of Umar Ibn Adabbas as the city's chief mosque. The architect Ahmad ben Basso laid it out as a rectangle of 113 by 135 metres, with a prayer hall of seventeen aisles and a courtyard for ritual washing. It was dedicated in 1182 and finished in 1198.

The minaret, begun in 1184, was built to resemble that of the Koutoubia mosque in Marrakesh. The chronicler Ibn Sahib al-Salah dates its completion to 10 March 1198, when four gilt bronze balls were set at its top.

Seville fell to Ferdinand III of Castile in November 1248 and the mosque was converted into the cathedral. Its orientation was changed, walls raised along the north and south sides divided it into chapels, and almost the whole eastern half was given over to a royal chapel holding the bodies of Ferdinand, his wife Beatrice of Swabia and their son Alfonso the Wise.

The building served Christian worship for more than 150 years; an earthquake in 1356 damaged it badly. On 8 July 1401 the chapter resolved to replace it, calling for "one so good that none will be its equal". Seville tradition gives the canons a blunter line: let us build a church so grand that those who see it finished will take us for mad.

The starting date is disputed: work is usually dated to 1402, though no documentary record survives before 1433 and Spanish accounts put the first works in 1434. Royal resistance to moving the royal chapel delayed matters until 1433, when John II of Castile allowed the royal bodies, Ferdinand III and Alfonso X among them, to be stored in the cloister; the old Capilla Real was then demolished so work could continue. The parish clergy offered half their stipends towards the work.

A succession of foreign masters ran the site: the Dutchman Ysambert from 1434, the Frenchman Carlín from 1439, then Juán Normán to 1472 and Alonso Rodríguez from 1502. The east end was finished by 1467, Enrique Aleman made the glass after 1478, and the Dutch artist Pieter Dancart began the great retable in 1482, working on it until his death in 1487, still unfinished. The only son of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile was baptised here in 1478.

The last stone was set at the top of the crossing lantern in October 1506, and the church was consecrated the next year. On 28 December 1511 a pier failed and the lantern and some vaults came down. Juan Gil de Hontañón the Elder designed the replacement, completed in 1517 by Spanish accounts and 1519 by others.

From 1528 rooms were added around the Gothic church, among them the main sacristy, the chapter house and the Capilla Real, under Diego de Riaño, Martín de Gainza and Asensio de Maeda; the cathedral and its dependencies were reckoned finished in 1593. In the same period Hernán Ruiz the Younger raised a belfry over the Almohad lantern, and in 1568 a statue representing the triumph of the Christian faith was set on top. The name Giraldillo attached to that figure, and Giralda to the tower, some 105 metres high.

Among the leading Spanish composers who served here as maestro de capilla were Francisco Guerrero, assistant from 1551 and choirmaster from 1574 until his death in 1599, and Alonso Lobo, a choirboy in the 1560s who returned in 1604 to take the same post.

The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 did only minor damage. In November 1874 thieves cut the figure of Saint Anthony out of Murillo's Vision of St Anthony in the baptistery chapel; in January 1875 it was offered to a New York gallery, whose owner Hermann Schaus agreed a price of $250 and alerted the Spanish consulate, and it was back in the canvas that year. On 1 August 1888 the crossing lantern collapsed a second time, in an earthquake that destroyed every precious object beneath it; Joaquín Fernández rebuilt it in the same form and work on the dome went on until at least 1903.

UNESCO inscribed the cathedral in 1987 with the adjoining Alcázar and the General Archive of the Indies, and it has been a bien de interés cultural since 1929. In 1988 the Guinness Book of Records certified it as the cathedral with the largest floor area in the world. Cracks found in 1980 led to a repair in 2008 that replaced 576 ashlars, averaging 250 kg each, in one pier. The metropolitan chapter keeps the daily liturgy and the feasts of Corpus and the Virgen de los Reyes; the building is self-financing, took 1,934,373 visitors in 2017 and passed 2.3 million in 2025.