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Trip ideas  /  3 days in Barcelona  /  Santa Maria del Mar
Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona, Catalonia
Historic site · Barcelona, Catalonia

Santa Maria del Mar

A church begun in 1329.Columns forty-three feet apart.A fire that lasted 11 days.A club crest on a window.

Photo: Kent Wang, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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The people's church

The common people backed this church, not the nobility

The first mention of a church here dates from 998. The present building was begun on 25 March 1329. It was backed by the common people rather than the nobility, and all the guilds of the Ribera quarter were involved in the construction.

The columns

The columns stand further apart than in any other Gothic church in Europe

The interior is of the basilica type, with three aisles forming a single space and slender octagonal columns. The spacing of the columns is the widest of any Gothic church in Europe, about forty-three feet apart.

The window

An earthquake in 1428 destroyed the rose window

The 1428 earthquake in Catalonia destroyed the rose window at the west end. The new window, in the Flamboyant style, was finished by 1459, and the glass was added a year later. The north-west tower was completed in 1496, but its companion not until 1902.

1936

The church burned for 11 days in 1936 and survived

Much of the decoration and the Baroque altar was destroyed in a fire set by anti-clerical rioters at the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. The church survived even though it burned for 11 days. FC Barcelona agreed to help pay for new windows if its coat of arms appeared on one of them.

Day 1, afternoon

It comes after Barcelona Cathedral. Then Barceloneta Beach.

More stories from this trip idea

The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.

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