As I have already said on other occasions, at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, who knows, really, if due to a stagnation in architectural conceptions or suggested by one of those fleeting fashions that to the beat of a little less than nascent Archaeological science that was beginning to rescue from its metaphorical tomb of oblivion and disdain the great creations of the European medieval past or encouraged by the excess of zeal of experts, such as the architect and restorer of the Parisian cathedral of Notre Dame, Viollet le Duc, began to to detect an unusual interest in the great styles of the past, focusing attention, above all, on the Romanesque and Gothic styles, creating a new trend, the neo-Romanesque or the neo-Gothic, not without, basically, beauty and romanticism.

It was also a time when authors such as John Ruskin -with his now reviled work 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture'- or great writers, such as Viscount Chateaubriand -whose work,' The Genius of Christianity 'ran the same fate as that of Ruskin- they saw in these unfathomable designs, that comparative 'matter of Britain' with which to speak at length about that wonderful current of spirituality that persists in each and every one of these constructions, whose antecedents, create it or no, they arouse passions nowadays, to the point of generating an important tourism of a cultural nature.

Madrid and its neo-Gothic Almudena Cathedral, I assure you that it is a good example of this, since together with the Royal Palace, the Orient Square and that splendid Center, known as 'the Madrid of the Austrias', it is one of the places most visited and frequented by tourists who visit our city during any time of the year.

Just a few insignificant meters away from that Royal Palace, completed by the brilliant Italian architect, Francesco Sabatini, the Almudena Cathedral, although very new in terms of time and construction, is, nevertheless, an immeasurable work of Art It is worth visiting, at least once in your life, as the writer Juan Eslava Galán would say, in his monumental guide to places in Spain to visit.

The Almudena Cathedral, although due to different circumstances, including a terrifying civil war, was slow to rise, like its distant relatives, the medieval cathedrals, the not inconsiderable amount of one hundred years, being the then King Alfonso XII, who placed the first stone, at the beginning of the so-called Cuesta de San Vicente (St. Vincent's slope), where you can still see part of the old walls that surrounded the city in the Middle Ages.

In fact, these received the Arabic name of al-muraima, so that it is assumed that this is the origin of the name of the image of the Black Madonna that was found hidden in a hole in the wall and therefore also in the cathedral. that currently houses it, although the original image seems to be that it was lost in a terrifying fire, although there are authors who suppose that part of its remains were piously placed inside the modern image, which arouses so much devotion among the people of Madrid.

In fact, to access it, you climb a staircase, reminiscent of another, the so-called Golden Staircase, made in 1519 by Diego de Siloé for the magnificent Cathedral of Santa María de Burgos.

With a traditional plan, in the shape of a cross, the Almudena Cathedral preserves all the details that made medieval cathedrals prodigiously great and being inside, it is also possible to appreciate why Goethe affirmed that those stonemasons were looking for God in the heights, because its vaults, lost in authentic stone forests, which are its formidable columns, give the sensation of getting lost in a mysterious infinity, where everything is calculated to the maximum detail.

Located in front of the altar, the choir is also a true work of art, whose gouty idiosyncrasy recalls those formidable legends about this type of monumental musical artifacts and the ghosts of its ancient and pious servants, such as Maese Pérez the organist, a Sevillian legend rescued by the distinguished Spanish poet, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer.

During its construction, many architects took up the cathedral project, until the one proposed by the architects Fernando Chueca and Luis Mosteiro in 1950 was definitively accepted, respecting the initial Gothic interior but giving the exterior a neoclassical appearance, so that it had a certain concordance with the neighboring Royal Palace.

Finally, to say that in that same place, one of the few late Romanesque churches in Madrid rose: the church of Santa María, which in addition to containing for a long time the original image of the Virgen de la Almudena, also had, painted al fresco, a Romanesque image of another mysterious Virgin known to few people from Madrid and which is currently preserved in the neo-Romanesque crypt of the cathedral, which we will talk about in another post: the Virgin of the Fleur de Lis.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and therefore are subject to my Copyright.