Salamanca Cathedral at Sunrise: The Old and New Cathedrals in Silhouette

Before the sun clears the horizon, Salamanca is only a shape. Against a sky burning from deep amber to pale gold, the twin cathedrals rise as one black silhouette: pinnacles, a tall bell tower, the great dome of the New Cathedral, all cut out as sharply as paper. No stone colour, no carving, no detail — just the outline of eight centuries of building on the hill above the river Tormes, held for a few minutes in the first light of the day.

Quick Facts
Photographer: Sapiens Verbum
Subject: The Old and New Cathedrals of Salamanca in silhouette against a golden sunrise sky
Location: Salamanca, Castile and León, Spain
Medium: Photograph – Colour
Series: Cityscapes

Salamanca Cathedral at sunrise, in silhouette. Photograph by Sapiens Verbum.

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What looks like one building is in fact two. Salamanca is one of the few cities in Spain with two cathedrals standing side by side. The Old Cathedral of Santa María was begun in the first third of the twelfth century, under Bishop Jerome of Périgord, and finished at the end of the fourteenth, in Romanesque and early Gothic style. When the city outgrew it, a new and much larger cathedral was begun beside it in 1513 instead of in its place, so the old church survived, built against the flank of the new one.

The New Cathedral took more than two centuries. Juan Gil de Hontañón and then his son Rodrigo directed the first campaigns, and the work, halted for most of the seventeenth century for lack of money, was only completed in 1733. That long history is written into its outline: late Gothic pinnacles, Plateresque decoration around the doors, and a Baroque dome first raised by Joaquín de Churriguera. Its bell tower, about 92 metres high, is one of the tallest in Spain; it was damaged by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and reinforced afterwards. Together with the University and the golden sandstone streets around them, the cathedrals are the heart of the Old City of Salamanca, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1988.

The sunrise strips all of that back to geometry. In daylight Salamanca is famous for the warm colour of its Villamayor stone; here there is no colour in the buildings at all, only in the sky. The silhouette works because the skyline is so distinctive: the dome, the lantern, the tower and the thicket of pinnacles are recognisable even as pure black shapes. It is the kind of image that reads from across a room, and that only exists for a few minutes before the light turns ordinary.

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Part of the Cityscapes series. For another Spanish cathedral in changing light, see Golden Light on the Obradoiro Facade, Santiago de Compostela Cathedral.

Sources

UNESCO World Heritage Centre — Old City of Salamanca
Wikipedia — New Cathedral of Salamanca
Wikipedia — Old Cathedral of Salamanca
Catedral de Salamanca — official site