Spain
Spain the Kingdom of Spain, is a country located in Europe. Its continental European territory is situated on the Iberian Peninsula, its territory includes two archipelagoes: the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa, the Balearic Islands in the Mediterranean Sea. The African enclaves of Ceuta, Peñón de Vélez de la Gomera make Spain the only European country to have a physical border with an African country. Several small islands in the Alboran Sea are part of Spanish territory; the country's mainland is bordered to the south and east by the Mediterranean Sea except for a small land boundary with Gibraltar. With an area of 505,990 km2, Spain is the largest country in Southern Europe, the second largest country in Western Europe and the European Union, the fourth largest country in the European continent. By population, Spain is the fifth in the European Union. Spain's capital and largest city is Madrid. Modern humans first arrived in the Iberian Peninsula around 35,000 years ago. Iberian cultures along with ancient Phoenician, Greek and Carthaginian settlements developed on the peninsula until it came under Roman rule around 200 BCE, after which the region was named Hispania, based on the earlier Phoenician name Spn or Spania.
At the end of the Western Roman Empire the Germanic tribal confederations migrated from Central Europe, invaded the Iberian peninsula and established independent realms in its western provinces, including the Suebi and Vandals. The Visigoths would forcibly integrate all remaining independent territories in the peninsula, including Byzantine provinces, into the Kingdom of Toledo, which more or less unified politically and all the former Roman provinces or successor kingdoms of what was documented as Hispania. In the early eighth century the Visigothic Kingdom fell to the Moors of the Umayyad Islamic Caliphate, who arrived to rule most of the peninsula in the year 726, leaving only a handful of small Christian realms in the north and lasting up to seven centuries in the Kingdom of Granada; this led to many wars during a long reconquering period across the Iberian Peninsula, which led to the creation of the Kingdom of Leon, Kingdom of Castile, Kingdom of Aragon and Kingdom of Navarre as the main Christian kingdoms to face the invasion.
Following the Moorish conquest, Europeans began a gradual process of retaking the region known as the Reconquista, which by the late 15th century culminated in the emergence of Spain as a unified country under the Catholic Monarchs. Until Aragon had been an independent kingdom, which had expanded toward the eastern Mediterranean, incorporating Sicily and Naples, had competed with Genoa and Venice. In the early modern period, Spain became the world's first global empire and the most powerful country in the world, leaving a large cultural and linguistic legacy that includes more than 570 million Hispanophones, making Spanish the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese. During the Golden Age there were many advancements in the arts, with world-famous painters such as Diego Velázquez; the most famous Spanish literary work, Don Quixote, was published during the Golden Age. Spain hosts the world's third-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Spain is a secular parliamentary democracy and a parliamentary monarchy, with King Felipe VI as head of state.
It is a major developed country and a high income country, with the world's fourteenth largest economy by nominal GDP and sixteenth largest by purchasing power parity. It is a member of the United Nations, the European Union, the Eurozone, the Council of Europe, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the Union for the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Schengen Area, the World Trade Organization and many other international organisations. While not an official member, Spain has a "Permanent Invitation" to the G20 summits, participating in every summit, which makes Spain a de facto member of the group; the origins of the Roman name Hispania, from which the modern name España was derived, are uncertain due to inadequate evidence, although it is documented that the Phoenicians and Carthaginians referred to the region as Spania, therefore the most accepted etymology is a Semitic-Phoenician one.
Down the centuries there have been a number of accounts and hypotheses: The Renaissance scholar Antonio de Nebrija proposed that the word Hispania evolved from the Iberian word Hispalis, meaning "city of the western world". Jesús Luis Cunchillos argues that the root of the term span is the Phoenician word spy, meaning "to forge metals". Therefore, i-spn-ya would mean "the land where metals are forged", it may be a derivation of the Phoenician I-Shpania, meaning "island of rabbits", "land of rabbits" or "edge", a reference to Spain's location at the end of the Mediterranean. The word in question means "Hyrax" due to Phoenicians confusing the two animals. Hispania may derive from the poetic use of the term Hesperia, reflecting the Greek perception of Italy as a "western land" or "land of the setting sun" (Hesperia
Richard Meier
Richard Meier is an American abstract artist and architect, whose geometric designs make prominent use of the color white. A winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1984, Meier has designed several iconic buildings including the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, San Jose City Hall. Meier was born to a Jewish family, the oldest of three sons of Carolyn and Jerome Meier, a wholesale wine and liquor salesman, in Newark, New Jersey, he grew up in nearby Maplewood. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University in 1957. After graduating, Meier traveled to Israel, Germany, Denmark and Italy, among other places, to network with architects. Meier is the second cousin of Peter Eisenman, an architect and fellow member of The New York Five. In New York City, Meier worked for Skidmore and Merrill in 1959, for Marcel Breuer for three years, prior to starting his own practice in 1963. In 1972, he was identified as one of The New York Five, a group of modernist architects: Meier, Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk.
Early in his career, Meier worked with artists such as painter Frank Stella and favored structures that were white and geometric. Meier first gained significant recognition for his designs of various residences, in addition to The Atheneum in New Harmony and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. Although Meier was an acclaimed architect for many years, his design of the Getty Center, a massive museum complex in Los Angeles, which opened in 1997, catapulted him into mainstream recognition; some of his other notable commissions include museums such as the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art in Spain and the Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills, California. Today, Richard Meier & Partners Architects has offices in New York and Los Angeles, with projects ranging from China and Tel Aviv to Paris and Hamburg. Much of Meier's work builds on the work of architects of the early to mid-20th century that of Le Corbusier his early work. Meier is considered to have built more using Corbusier's ideas than anyone, including Le Corbusier himself.
Meier expanded many ideas evident in Le Corbusier's work the Villa Savoye and the Swiss Pavilion. His work reflects the influences of other designers such as Mies Van der Rohe and, in some instances, Frank Lloyd Wright and Luis Barragán. White has been used in many architectural landmark buildings throughout history, including cathedrals and the white-washed villages of the Mediterranean region, in Spain, southern Italy and Greece; the Mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, included in his campaign platform a promise to tear down the large travertine wall of Meier's Ara Pacis. Alemmano has since changed his stance on the building and has agreed with Meier to modifications including drastically reducing the height of the wall between an open-air space outside the museum and a busy road along the Tiber river; the city plans to run the road underneath it. "It's an improvement," says Meier, adding that "the reason that wall was there has to do with traffic and noise. Once, eliminated, the idea of opening the piazza to the river is a good one."
The mayor’s office said Alemanno hopes to complete the project before the end of his term in 2013. In 1984, Meier was awarded the Pritzker Prize; the jury citation declared that Meier has "created structures which are personal, original." In 2008, he won the gold medal in architecture from the Academy of Arts and Letters and his work Jesolo Lido Village was awarded the Dedalo Minosse International Prize for commissioning a building. Meier is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council, he was awarded the AIA Gold Medal in 1997. In 2013, he was awarded the A+ Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2010, Cornell established a new professorship named for Meier. Paying tribute Meier on the occasion of his firm's 50th anniversary, the Fondazione Bisazza presented the exhibition “Richard Meier: Architecture and Design” in Vicenza, Italy. In 2014, Meier opened a 15,000-square-foot exhibition space museum at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City; the space gathers much of his life’s work under one roof, replaces a much smaller version that opened in 2007 in Long Island City and that until 2013 was open only by appointment to students and tour groups.
The new venue provides room to show his own sculptures, architectural drawings and collages for the first time, is planned to include a research library. On March 13, 2018, The New York Times detailed allegations from five women that Meier had sexually harassed or assaulted them. Meier responded by saying. In response to the allegations and Meier's apology, his alma mater Cornell University declined his intended endowment of a named chair and instituted a review of his previous donations. On April 6, 2018, an additional four women who worked at Meier's architecture firm came forward with allegations against him; the most recent allegations dated to 2009. On October 9, 2018, the firm announced. Major works by Meier include the High Museum in Atlanta, Meier on Rothschild, On Prospect Park. Frampton, Rykwert, Joseph: Richard Meier, Rizz
Barcelona Royal Shipyard
The Barcelona Royal Shipyard is a shipyard and former military building of Gothic architecture placed at the Port Vell area of the Port of Barcelona. Nowadays it houses the Barcelona Maritime Museum. Construction started during the 13th century under the rule of Peter III of Aragon. During excavations in 2012 it was discovered that in the late 16th century a new building was constructed on top of the old medieval dockyard, giving the building its current structure; this excavations uncovered a Roman graveyard. The shipyard's restoration was finished in early 2013; the museum was reopened in 2014. The construction of the dockyards was done in several stages, spanning over four centuries: 13th century: There is reference to an old shipyard in a document dated 1241, when James I of Aragon ordered that no house or structure should be built on the coastline between the city walls and "the ataszana, to the west”. 13th century: This period of construction started with the War of the Sicilian Vespers.
In 1285, Peter III of Aragon ordered the construction of the shipyard, a rectangular fortification with no roof consisting of fortified walls and four towers, of which two still exist. The shipyard opened to the east. 14th century: This expansion comprises the period from 1328 to 1390. The city walls where included the shipyard inside the fortified city. A roof was added to prevent the degradation of the galleys stored during winter. 15th century: Construction started in 1390 and lasted until 1415. A new area, “Porxo Nou”, was added to the building; this part of the shipyard is known as “Pere IV”. The area was meant to be a royal palace, but the idea was discarded. Excavation shows. 16th century: The medieval building was replaced by a new dockyard a few meters inland. The new shipyards continue to use Gothic architecture, since it had proven to be the most practical and reliable at the time, This decision, managed to confuse historians trying to date the building; the construction of the new dockyards and the move inland was caused by the construction of the city's port during the 15th century.
The new port had changed the currents and moved the shore inland, causing severe flooding in the old medieval building. 17th century: In 1612, the Catalan government decided to add three naves to the building. Following the Catalan Revolt the Spanish government further amplified the shipyard both as an arsenal and a barracks. 18th century: In 1725, Two more barracks were constructed, one for cavalry and one for infantry. These barracks where torn down in 1935; the last major update came between 1742 and 1749, when the roofs of the two central naves were converted into a single nave, known as “Nau Central”. From the beginning the aim of the shipyard was to build the galleys for the Aragonese Armada; the shipyard was a naval arsenal, used to store galleys and all the rigging and apparatus needed. The arsenal produced a great deal of material, both sales and cordages for the ships and arms for the men. Naval arsenals of the time had to produce and store food also. After the 1381 renovation, the building had eight naves, 8.4 m wide.
The naves were 60m long, consisting of 17 columns 77 cm wide and 6 m high. Thanks to a written record of the time we know. Ashlar from the nearby mountain of Montjuïc was used for the construction, with sand from the beach in front of the shipyard, wood from the Baix Ebre and Gavarres and ropes and tiles from Valencia. During the rule of Alfonso V of Aragon, the shipyard experienced its highest activity. In 1423, twelve galleys were built simultaneously. In 1571, the royal galley of John of Austria known as the Real, was built at the shipyard; this galley was the flagship at the Battle of Lepanto. There is a reproduction of this galley at the Barcelona Maritime Museum. During the 18th century, the shipbuilding was moved to the Cartagena shipyard, after the War of Spanish Succession the site was use as an artillery barrack for the Spanish Army; the building was used to build and repair artillery pieces. In 1935, the building was given to the Barcelona city hall who decide to use it as a maritime museum, which opened in 1941.
On 5 May 1976, the building was declared a Cultural Site of National Interest. The closest tube station is Drassanes, the Catalan word for shipyard, in the line of the Barcelona Metro network. Catalan Gothic Volum 3, Art de Catalunya, arquitectura civil i industrial, Edicions L'isard. ISBN 84-89931-04-6 Volum III, L'Art Gòtic a Catalunya, Arquitectura III, Enciclopèdia Catalana. ISBN 84-412-0887-5 Volum 7, La Gran Enciclopèdia en català, Edicions 62. ISBN 84-297-5435-0 Restoration of the Drassanes Reials
Casa Amatller
Casa Amatller is a building in the Modernisme style in Barcelona, designed by Josep Puig i Cadafalch. Along with Casa Batlló and Casa Lleó-Morera, it makes up the three most important buildings in Barcelona's famous Illa de la Discòrdia, noted for its unique modernist buildings; the building was designed as a residence for chocolatier Antoni Amatller and was constructed between 1898 and 1900. List of Modernisme buildings in Barcelona Official City of Barcelona Site Casa Amatller at Tot Passejant
Casa Batlló
Casa Batlló is a building in the center of Barcelona. It was designed by Antoni Gaudí, is considered one of his masterpieces. A remodel of a built house, it was redesigned in 1904 by Gaudí and has been refurbished several times after that. Gaudí's assistants Domènec Sugrañes i Gras, Josep Canaleta and Joan Rubió contributed to the renovation project; the local name for the building is Casa dels ossos, as it has a skeletal organic quality. Like everything Gaudí designed, it is only identifiable as Modernisme or Art Nouveau in the broadest sense; the ground floor, in particular, has unusual tracery, irregular oval windows and flowing sculpted stone work. There are few straight lines, much of the façade is decorated with a colorful mosaic made of broken ceramic tiles; the roof was likened to the back of a dragon or dinosaur. A common theory about the building is that the rounded feature to the left of centre, terminating at the top in a turret and cross, represents the lance of Saint George, plunged into the back of the dragon.
The building, now Casa Batlló was built in 1877, commissioned by Lluís Sala Sánchez. It was a classical building without remarkable characteristics within the eclecticism traditional by the end of the 19th century; the building had a ground floor, four other floors and a garden in the back. The house was bought by Josep Batlló in 1900; the design of the house made the home undesirable to buyers but the Batlló family decided to buy the place due to its centralized location. It is located in the middle of Passeig de Gracia, which in the early 20th century was known as a prestigious and fashionable area, it was an area. In 1906 Josep Batlló still owned the home; the Batlló family was well known in Barcelona for its contribution to the textile industry in the city. Mr. Josep Batlló I Casanovas was a textile industrialist. Mr. Batlló married Amalia Godo Belaunzaran, from the family that founded the newspaper La Vanguardia. Josep wanted an architect that would design a house, like no other and stood out as being audacious and creative.
Both Josep and his wife were open to anything and they decided not to limit Gaudí. Josep did not want his house to resemble any of the houses of the rest of the Batlló family, such as Casa Pía, built by the Josep Vilaseca, he chose the architect who had designed Park Güell because he wanted him to come up with a risky plan. The family lived on the Noble Floor of Casa Batlló until the middle of the 1950s. In 1904 Josep Batlló hired Gaudí to design his home. Gaudí convinced Josep that a renovation was sufficient and was able to submit the planning application the same year; the building was completed and refurbished in 1906. He changed the main apartment which became the residence for the Batlló family, he expanded the central well in order to supply light to the whole building and added new floors. In the same year the Barcelona City Council selected the house as a candidate for that year's best building award; the award was given to another architect that year despite Gaudí's design. Josep Batlló died in 1934 and the house was kept in order by the wife until her death in 1940.
After the death of the two parents, the house was kept and managed by the children until 1954. In 1954 an insurance company named Seguros Iberia set up offices there. In 1970, the first refurbishment occurred in several of the interior rooms of the house. In 1983, the exterior balconies were restored to their original colour and a year the exterior façade was illuminated in the ceremony of La Mercè. In 1993, the current owners of Casa Batlló bought the home and continued refurbishments throughout the whole building. Two years in 1995, Casa Batlló began to hire out its facilities for different events. More than 2,500 square meters of rooms within the building were rented out for many different functions. Due to the building's location and the beauty of the facilities being rented, the rooms of Casa Batlló were in high demand and hosted many important events for the city; the local name for the building is Casa dels ossos, as it has a skeletal organic quality. The building looks remarkable — like everything Gaudí designed, only identifiable as Modernisme or Art Nouveau in the broadest sense.
The ground floor, in particular, is rather astonishing with tracery, irregular oval windows and flowing sculpted stone work. It seems. Much of the façade is decorated with a mosaic made of broken ceramic tiles that starts in shades of golden orange moving into greenish blues; the roof was likened to the back of a dragon or dinosaur. A common theory about the building is that the rounded feature to the left of centre, terminating at the top in a turret and cross, represents the lance of Saint George, plunged into the back of the dragon; the loft is considered to be one of the most unusual spaces. It was a service area for the tenants of the different apartments in the building which contained laundry rooms and storage areas, it is known for its simplicity of shapes and its Mediterranean influence through the use of white on the walls. It contains a series of sixty catenary arches that creates a space which represents the ribcage of an animal; some people believe that the “ribcage” design of the arches is a ribcage for the dragon's
Modernism
Modernism is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the factors that shaped modernism were the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed by reactions of horror to World War I. Modernism rejected the certainty of Enlightenment thinking, many modernists rejected religious belief. Modernism, in general, includes the activities and creations of those who felt the traditional forms of art, literature, religious faith, social organization, activities of daily life, sciences, were becoming ill-fitted to their tasks and outdated in the new economic and political environment of an emerging industrialized world; the poet Ezra Pound's 1934 injunction to "Make it new!" was the touchstone of the movement's approach towards what it saw as the now obsolete culture of the past. In this spirit, its innovations, like the stream-of-consciousness novel and twelve-tone music, divisionist painting and abstract art, all had precursors in the 19th century.
A notable characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness and irony concerning literary and social traditions, which led to experiments with form, along with the use of techniques that drew attention to the processes and materials used in creating a painting, building, etc. Modernism explicitly rejected the ideology of realism and made use of the works of the past by the employment of reprise, rewriting, recapitulation and parody; some commentators define modernism as a mode of thinking—one or more philosophically defined characteristics, like self-consciousness or self-reference, that run across all the novelties in the arts and the disciplines. More common in the West, are those who see it as a progressive trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create and reshape their environment with the aid of practical experimentation, scientific knowledge, or technology. From this perspective, modernism encouraged the re-examination of every aspect of existence, from commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was'holding back' progress, replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end.
Others focus on modernism as an aesthetic introspection. This facilitates consideration of specific reactions to the use of technology in the First World War, anti-technological and nihilistic aspects of the works of diverse thinkers and artists spanning the period from Friedrich Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett. While some scholars see modernism continuing into the twenty first century, others see it evolving into late modernism or high modernism. Postmodernism refutes its basic assumptions. According to one critic, modernism developed out of Romanticism's revolt against the effects of the Industrial Revolution and bourgeois values: "The ground motive of modernism, Graff asserts, was criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order and its world view the modernists, carrying the torch of romanticism." While J. M. W. Turner, one of the greatest landscape painters of the 19th century, was a member of the Romantic movement, as "a pioneer in the study of light and atmosphere", he "anticipated the French Impressionists" and therefore modernism "in breaking down conventional formulas of representation.
The dominant trends of industrial Victorian England were opposed, from about 1850, by the English poets and painters that constituted the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, because of their "opposition to technical skill without inspiration." They were influenced by the writings of the art critic John Ruskin, who had strong feelings about the role of art in helping to improve the lives of the urban working classes, in the expanding industrial cities of Britain. Art critic Clement Greenberg describes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood as proto-Modernists: "There the proto-Modernists were, of all people, the pre-Raphaelites; the Pre-Raphaelites foreshadowed Manet, with whom Modernist painting most begins. They acted on a dissatisfaction with painting as practiced in their time, holding that its realism wasn't truthful enough." Rationalism has had opponents in the philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom had significant influence on existentialism. However, the Industrial Revolution continued.
Influential innovations included steam-powered industrialization, the development of railways, starting in Britain in the 1830s, the subsequent advancements in physics and architecture associated with this. A major 19th-century engineering achievement was The Crystal Palace, the huge cast-iron and plate glass exhibition hall built for The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. Glass and iron were used in a similar monumental style in the construction of major railway terminals in London, such as Paddington Station and King's Cross station; these technological advances led to the building of structures like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower. The latter broke all previous limitations on; these engineering marvels radically altered the 19th-century urban environment and the daily lives of people. The human experience of time itself was altered, with the development of the electric telegraph from 1837, the adoption
Barcelona Cathedral
Not to be confused with Sagrada Família, a large church by Antoni Gaudí, Santa Maria del Mar known from the novel Cathedral of the Sea - both in Barcelona. The Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia known as Barcelona Cathedral, is the Gothic cathedral and seat of the Archbishop of Barcelona, Spain; the cathedral was constructed from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, with the principal work done in the fourteenth century. The cloister, which encloses the Well of the Geese was completed in 1448. In the late nineteenth century, the neo-Gothic façade was constructed over the nondescript exterior, common to Catalan churches; the roof is notable for its gargoyles, featuring a wide range of animals, both domestic and mythical. It is a pseudo-basilica, vaulted over the outer two divided into chapels; the transept is truncated. The east end is a chevet of nine radiating chapels connected by an ambulatory; the high altar is raised. The cathedral is dedicated to Eulalia of Barcelona, co-patron saint of Barcelona, a young virgin who, according to Catholic tradition, suffered martyrdom during Roman times in the city.
One story says that she was exposed naked in the public square and a miraculous snowfall in mid-spring covered her nudity. The enraged Romans rolled it down a street; the body of Saint Eulalia is entombed in the cathedral's crypt. The choir stalls retain the coats-of-arms of the knights of the Order of the Golden Fleece. In his first trip into Spain, the future Holy Roman Emperor, selected Barcelona as the site of a chapter of his Order; the king had arrived for his investiture as Count of Barcelona, the city, as a Mediterranean port, offered the closest communication with other far-flung Habsburg dominions, while the large proportions of the cathedral would accommodate required grand ceremonies. In 1518 the Order's herald, Thomas Isaac, its treasurer, Jean Micault, were commissioned to prepare the sanctuary for the first sitting of the chapter in 1519. Juan de Borgonya executed the painted decoration of the sanctuary. "The church was named after Barcelona's patron saint Eulalia. The used name La Seu refers to the status of the church as the seat of the diocese."
The side Chapel of the Holy Sacrament and of the Holy Christ of Lepanto contains a cross said to date from the time of the Battle of Lepanto. In addition to Saints Eulàlia and Olegarius, the cathedral contains the tombs of Saint Raymond of Penyafort, Count Ramon Berenguer I and his third wife Almodis de la Marche, bishops Berenguer de Palou II, Salvador Casañas y Pagés, Arnau de Gurb, buried in the Chapel of Santa Llúcia, which he had constructed; the cathedral has a secluded Gothic cloister where 13 white geese are kept, the number explained by the assertion that Eulalia was 13 when she was martyred. A program of cleaning and restoration of the cathedral was carried out from 1968-72. Parts of an early Christian and visigothic episcopal complex including the baptistery, a basilical hall, a cross shaped church and bishop's palace are displayed in Barcelona City History Museum archaeological underground; this Visigothic chapel was dedicated to Saint James, was the proprietary church of the Viscounts of Barcelona.
However, in a document from the Second Council of Barcelona in 599, it states that the cathedral was dedicated to the Holy Cross. This church was damaged by al-Mansur during his attack on Barcelona in 985. In 1046, Count Ramon Berenguer I and his wife Almodis, together with Bishop Guislabert, began construction of a Romanesque cathedral at the site; the cathedral was constructed over the crypt of the former church. It has been reported that a Viscount of Barcelona, Mir Geribert, sold the site to Bishop Guislebert in 1058, though however this date does not coincide with the reported start of construction; the present Gothic cathedral was begun on the foundations of the previous churches on 1 May 1298. The church was built from the east end towards the west end, with a simple west facade completed in 1417; the cloister was completed in 1448. In the late nineteenth century, Miguel Girona i Agrafel offered to complete the neo-Gothic facade and central tower as inspired by the original fifteenth-century design prepared by master Carlí and rearranged and drawn by the architect Josep O. Mestres.
This work was completed in 1913 by Girona's children. The Chapel of the Holy Sacrament and of the Holy Christ of Lepanto is a small side chapel constructed by Arnau Bargués in 1407, as the chapterhouse, it was rebuilt in the seventeenth century to house the tomb of San Olegarius, Bishop of Barcelona and Archbishop of Tarragona. The "Holy Christ of Lepanto" crucifix, is located on the upper part of the chapel entrance's front façade; the curved shape of the body is explained by a Catalan legend which holds that the cross was carried on the prow of the galley captained by Juan of Austria, step-brother of Spanish Philip II of Spain during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. When a cannonball flew toward the cross, it leaned out of the way in order to avoid being hit, has been inclined since; the Habsburgs were said to have r
