The remaining portions of the thirteenth-century church have been so much altered that the general effect of the early work is almost entirely destroyed. The columns and arches generally are original; the former have carved capitals; many of the latter are slightly horseshoe in shape, and have labels enriched with the dog-tooth ornament. The choir and transepts retain a good simple arcaded triforium, carried on detached shafts, and this returns across the gable-walls of the latter; it is of the simplest early pointed character; so too are the choir windows, which before their alteration appear to have been lancets, with engaged shafts in their jambs, whilst in the eastern wall of the transepts are windows of two lancet lights, with a circle above within an enclosing arch. Most of the arches of the nave are adorned with carved flowers on the chamfers, the effect of which is not good; indeed I half doubted whether they were not plaster additions, though they seemed to be just too good for this. The choir has two (and only two) flying buttresses; and as they are evidently of early date, with pinnacles of the very simplest pyramidal outline, they were probably erected to counteract a settlement which showed itself immediately after the erection of the church, for there is no evidence of any others having existed. The walls of the apse had originally a richly carved cornice, filled with heads and foliage. The groining of the aisles is generally simple and early in date, and quadripartite in plan: that of the whole of the rest of the choir and nave is of the richest description, and of the latest kind of Gothic.

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Here, as is so frequently the case all over the world, the builders of one period used an entirely different material from that used by those of earlier times;[388] so that you may tell with tolerable accuracy the date of the work by the material of which it is built. Here the early church was entirely built of stone, but in all the later additions brick is the prevailing material; and at first sight it is in these later additions that we seem to find almost all the most characteristic work in the church. Many of these additions, as for instance the Churrigueresque alterations of the clerestory, are thoroughly bad and contemptible; but some of them, though they damage the unity of effect of the building, and have taken the place of work which one would much rather have seen still intact, are nevertheless striking in themselves. Such is the singular and picturesque Cimborio erected by Canon Juan Muñoz[389] in the sixteenth century; it is certainly most picturesque, but such a curious and complex combination of pinnacles and turrets built of brick, and largely inlaid with green, blue, and white tiles, is perhaps nowhere else to be seen. It is octagonal in plan, and of three stages in height, the angles of the octagons in the several stages being all counterchanged. Enormous coats of arms decorate the fronts of the buttresses. The whole work is of the very latest possible Gothic, utterly against all rules both in design and decoration, and yet, notwithstanding all this, it is unquestionably striking in its effect. The mixture of glazed tiles with brickwork has here been carried to a very great extent, and the result does not, I think, encourage any one to hope for much from this kind of development. This work is not to be compared to that at the east end of Zaragoza Cathedral, where a plain piece of wall is carefully covered all over with a rich coloured diaper of brickwork and tiles, which are all harmonious and uniform in character, and—which is equally important—in texture, and it has, on the contrary, great similarity to some attempts to combine bricks and tiles which we see made in the present day, and seems to show that these attempts are not to be carelessly encouraged. For even when such work is first executed, and the brickwork is fresh and neat, I think we always feel that the smooth hard surface of the tile offers rather too great a contrast to the rougher texture of the bricks; and whilst the former is likely to remain almost unchanged for ever, the latter is certain gradually to grow rougher and ruder in its aspect, until, in the end, we shall have walls showing everywhere picturesque marks of age, and yet with their decorations as fresh as if they had but just been introduced. Nothing can well be worse than this; for if the appearance of age is to be venerated at all, it must be somewhat uniformly evident; and it no more answers to permit the decorations on an old and rugged wall to be always new and fresh-looking, than it does to allow a juvenile wig to be put on the venerable head of an old man!

The brick steeple of the cathedral is an inferior example of the same kind as that of la Magdalena, which I shall have presently to describe; its upper half is modern, and the lowest stage of stone. The west front is all modernized, and the north transept is conspicuous for a large porch of base design, erected probably in the sixteenth century, and exhibiting a curious though very unsuccessful attempt to copy—or perhaps I ought to say caricature—early work.

The whole of the clerestory walls have been raised with a stage of brickwork above the windows, which was added probably in the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

The cloister, built in the beginning of the sixteenth century, by D. Guillen Ramon de Moncada, is a remarkable example of very rich brickwork. It deserves illustration as being of an extremely uncommon style, and withal very effective. All the arches and jambs of the openings are of moulded brick, and there are brick enclosing arches, and a very simple brick cornice outside; but the delicate traceries which give so much character to the work are all cut in thin slabs of stone let into the brickwork. Of course such a work was not intended for glazing, and was an ingenious arrangement for rendering the cloister cool and unaffected by the sun, even when at its hottest. The forms of the openings here are certainly not good, and look much more like domestic than ecclesiastical work; but in spite of this one cannot but be thankful for novelty, whenever it is, as here, legitimately obtained. The bricks are of a very pale red tint, 12½ inches long, 6¼ inches wide, and from 1½ to 1¾ thick, and the mortar-joint, as usual, is very thick—generally about ¾ of an inch. The cloister is groined, and probably in brick, but is now plastered or whitewashed unsparingly, and its effect is in great degree ruined.

The sacristies are rather peculiar in their arrangement: they are all groined, and one of them has a small recess in one angle with a chair in it facing a crucifix, of which I could not learn the use. Another of this group of buildings contains a fountain under a small dome, the plashing of whose waters seemed to make it a very popular rendezvous of the people, and made itself heard everywhere throughout the sacristies and their passages.

The stalls in the Coro are of very late Gothic, the bishop’s stall, with one on either side of it in the centre of the west end, having lofty canopies. The Coro is more than usually separated from the Capilla mayor, and there can be little doubt that it does not occupy its original position. The men who built so long a nave would never have done so simply to render its length useless by so perverse an arrangement of the choir. Here, in fact, the Coro occupies the same kind of position to which one so often sees it reduced in parish churches in Spain, where it is usually either in a western gallery, or at any rate at the extreme western end of the nave, behind everybody’s backs, and apparently out of their minds!