Santa Maria del Mar

Church · El Born / La Ribera (Ciutat Vella)Barcelona,Spain

A Barcelona church built as one unbroken room in fifty-four years, its columns thirteen metres apart, its stone left bare by an eleven-day fire.

Santa Maria del Mar is a single room. The three aisles rise to nearly the same height, there is no transept and no screen, and the eye runs the length of the church without meeting an edge. Berenguer de Montagut set the octagonal columns about thirteen metres apart, the widest column spacing of any Gothic church in Europe. What you see is bare stone, and that is recent: in July 1936 the fittings were set alight and the church burned for eleven days. It went up in fifty-four years, which for a medieval church is almost no time at all. One master builder held the plan from the first stone in 1329 to the last in 1383, so nothing was restyled halfway through. The parish of the Ribera paid for it and owned it outright. The bastaixos, the porters who carried cargo off ships too big to reach the shore, brought the blocks down from the royal quarry on Montjuïc on their own backs and took nothing for it. Mass is said here every day, and the columns are still dark above head height.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come before the visiting hours start — the church opens first for worship, when it is free to walk in and nearly empty, and the tour groups arrive later in the morning.
A wide lens defeats this interior — no single spot holds the whole nave, so photograph one bay of columns at a time and let the repetition carry it.
The grey patches are not stone — hard cement was used to fill the fire damage after 1936, and it has weathered worse than the sandstone it was meant to protect.

Things to do

1
Cross the floor in one unbroken line
Start at the west door and go straight down the middle to the altar. Nothing crosses your path: no transept, no screen, no step until the end. Halfway along, stop and look sideways. The columns stand so far apart that the side aisles read as part of the same room rather than corridors beside it.
2
Trace the porters through the stonework
On each leaf of the main bronze door is a bastaix, a Ribera porter bent under a block of stone. Inside, look along the capitals of the columns nearest the door and the same men come back in the carving, shouldering loads and measuring grain. The porters are the one trade the church put into its own stone.
3
Climb out onto the roof terraces
A small guided climb takes a spiral stair inside one of the towers and comes out on the flat stone terraces above the vaults, more than thirty metres up. From there you look at the rose window from behind, walk between the gargoyles, and see the tiled roofs of the Born quarter packed tight against the church walls.
4
Sit through a service from the back
Mass is said here every day and the church stays open through it. Take a chair at the west end rather than leaving. Sound behaves oddly in a room this wide and this bare: a single voice at the altar carries the whole length without amplification, which is what the shape was built to do.