Art and Travel Notebooks: Avila's cathedral

There is no doubt that the cathedral of Ávila, is one of the most unique buildings in its genre, because it was not only projected as a temple, but also as a fortress, being also imprecise the moment of its construction, although the general trend tends to place it in the twelfth century, coinciding with the repopulation carried out in the time of King Alfonso VI of León.

Inaccurate, too, is the attribution to Magister Muri who intervened in its first phase and therefore, the oldest - the hypothesis that it was built on the ruined foundations of the old church of the Savior is shuffled, perhaps hence its invocation - although the name of Fruchel, a dark architect of probable Frankish origin, who may have accompanied the hosts of Raymond of Burgundy, responsible, apart from military orders, for the aforementioned restocking is considered.

Considered as the first gothic cathedral in Spain, there are those who appreciate in it many similarities with the French basilica of Saint-Denis, although the latter lacks the magic and spectacularity provided by that genuine Berroquen stone - gilded by suns of centuries and centuries of suns, as Don Miguel de Unamuno states - that give it an aspect, especially in its interior, definitely overwhelming, in the broadest sense of the term.

Perhaps because of this, it is difficult to feel spiritual laziness - continuing with Unamuno, when referring to the Platonian concept of misology - when it enters such a place, certainly complex and mysterious.

A place where, as in that sacred and primal forest, an immeasurable sketch from whose source much of the Gothic dream was nourished, there are shady places, far from the diaphanous light that seeps through the glass of its windows, but from branches pointed in the direction of that Axis Mundi constituted by the central ambulatory, composed of a double ambulatory, in memory, perhaps, of those oriental models, based on the Sepulchrum Domine of Jerusalem.

An architectural model, imported from the East by the crusaders who returned to Europe and that also served, as Viollet-le-Duc, the great architect and restorer of the Parisian cathedral of Notre-Dame, who unfortunately, has currently made us Overwhelmed everyone, with the dreadful fire suffered and we sympathize with their speedy recovery - as an 'architectural model' of the Knights Templar.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.