• CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA
  • The church
  • The Front Façade
  • The Abbot's tower
• CHURCH OF SAN JUAN
  • 1st Period
  • 2nd Period
  • 3rd Period
  • The Rerados Pieces

CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA

It is located at the north of the town and it shelters the streets from the cold winds coming from The Cantabrian Mountains. The width of this church is the same as that of the three longitudinal streets of Laguardia altogether: Páganos street at the west side, Santa Engracia street at the east side and the Main street at the centre of the town. Walking up the latter one you can get to the front door of  the church.

The temple has a rectangular floor plan with three longitudinal naves that are divided by pillars. It also has a transept (which is longer than the church itself, since it has two chapels at both ends) and an apse that is semicircular inwards and polygonal outwards. Next to the  Apse, on the side where the Epistolary is read, we find the vestry, of Renaissance style, added in 1549 when the Gothic Sanctuary ending in three Apses was demolished and the construction was finished such as we can see it nowadays.

There are Gothic vaults with tiercerons covering the naves, whereas the central part of the transept has a Renaissance coffered vault with images, among which the wall relief of “El Padre Eterno (The Eternal Father) stands out. The other two parts of the transept have Gothic vaults built in trapezoidal segments, resulting in star-shaped vaults with very big Renaissance key stones.

Building periods

We can speak of several building periods since the finishing of the temple took a really long time and every architectural change made the mark of the style that was predominant at that time .

The first artistic traces are located at the north and northeast parts at the outside of the church. They are the walls that can be seen from the school yard. Here we find small walled up arches and Lombard fascians that decorate the top of the wall. They date from the 12 th century, when the building was started in the Romanesque style of those times.

The Romanesque style of Santa María de los Reyes was preserved at the end of the 12 th century and during the following one, which left its sign on the western wall, opposite the Abbot's Tower. This wall is at the foot of the temple and underwent a major architectural change at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century.

Here we can see two transitional Romanesque windows, which were completely restored and rebuilt.

We can also see a Gothic door at the northwest end of the left wall; this door is walled up in the inside and it is made up several archivolts that stem from round columns topped by capitals with plant motifs. There is a small pentice over these archivolts and it is held by corvels that are also decorated with plant motifs and anthropomorphic figures.

At the foot of the nave, under the choir, there is a new door with semicircular arches, and topped by two thick pilasters serving as buttresses and dating from the rebuilding that was carried out in 1954 .

During the Gothic period (13 th to 15 th centuries), the temple was enlarged with new constructions that followed the style of each century.

At the beginning of the Gothic period the height of the temple was raised and the burial arches were made. Later on, in the 14 th  century some architectural changes were introduced, such as ribbed vaults with tercierons, and some working was made on the central columns. This period witnessed the most important architectural change that took place in the temple: The front façade leading to the inside of the church.

Ayuntamiento de Laguardia
Guardiako Udala
© 2005