The ground plan ([Plate II.]) will explain the general scheme of the building—a nave and aisles, ended at the east with three parallel apses, a cloister, and a large hall on the south of and opening into the cloister. The north side of the cloister has been much mutilated by the erection of chapels and a sacristy, whilst the north wall of the church is blocked up by low buildings built against it. The only good view of the exterior is that from the south-west. Spanish boys did their best to make sketching it impossible, yet their amusements were after all legitimate enough for their age, and it is very seldom in Spain that a sketcher is mobbed and annoyed in the way he commonly is in France or Italy when he ventures on a sketch in an at all public place.

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The erection of this church may, I believe, be dated between A.D. 1280-1350; and to the earlier of these two periods the grand west doorway probably belongs. The tympanum contains, in its upper compartment, our Lord seated, with St. John the Evangelist, the Blessed Virgin and angels kneeling on either side—a very favourite subject with Burgalese sculptors of the period; below is the martyrdom of the patron saint, divided into three subjects: (1) St. Stephen before the king; (2) Martyrdom of St. Stephen, angels taking his soul from his body; and (3) the devil taking the soul of his persecutor. The jambs have each three figures under canopies, among which are St. Stephen (with stones sticking to his vestments) and St. Laurence. The doorway is built out in a line with the front of the tower buttresses, and above it a modern balustrade is placed in advance of the west window, which is a fine rose of twenty rays. This window at a little distance has all the effect of very early work; but upon close inspection its details and mouldings all belie this impression, and prove it to be certainly not earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century. The whole of the tracery is thoroughly geometrical, and the design very good. Above it is a lancet window on each face, and then the lower part only of a belfry window of two lights, cut off by one of the usual flat-pitched tiled roofs. A staircase turret is carried up in the south-west angle and finished with a weathering at the base of the belfry stage. The buttresses are all plain, and, as I have said, shorn of the pinnacles with which they were evidently intended to be finished.[47]

This church seems to be always locked up, and I think it was here that the woman who lives in the cloister and shows the church told me that there was service in the church once only in the week; and certainly it had the air which a church misused in this way usually assumes.

We were admitted by the cloister, a small and much mutilated work of circa A.D. 1300. It opens by four arches into a large hall on its south side, which is groined at a higher level than the cloister. The groining of the cloister is good, and the ribs well moulded; but the window tracery is all destroyed, and most of the windows are blocked up. The central court is very small, as indeed is the whole work; but a cloister may be of any size, and in some of our many collegiate erections of the present day it would be as well to remember this, and emulate really and fairly the beautiful effects always attained by our forefathers in this way.[48]

In the western wall of the cloister are two arched recesses for monuments, one of which has a coped tomb, with eight steps to the foot of the cross, which is carved upon its lid. The eastern side is later than the rest, and its groining probably not earlier than A.D. 1500.

Entering the church from hence we find a very solid, simple, and dignified building, spoilt indeed as much as possible by yellow wash, but still in other respects very little damaged. It is groined throughout, and the groining has the peculiarity of having ridge ribs longitudinally but not transversely. This is common in Spain; but it is impossible to see why one ridge should require it and the other not, and the only explanation is that possibly the architect wished to lead the eye on from end to end of the building. In the groining of an apse this ridge-rib in its western part always looks very badly, and jars with the curved lines of all the rest of the ribs. The columns of the nave arcades are circular, with eight smaller engaged shafts around them, those under the western tower being rather more elaborate and larger than the others. Here we see a clear imitation of the very similar planning of the cathedral nave. The planning of the east end is more interesting, because, whilst it has no precedent in the cathedral, it is one of the evidences we have of the connexion of the Spanish architecture of the middle ages with that of other countries, which we ought not to overlook. I have said something on this in speaking of the plan of Las Huelgas. Here, however, I do not think we can look in the same direction for the original type of plan; for, numerous as are the varieties of ground-plan which we see in France, there is one—the parallel-triapsidal—which we meet so seldom that we may almost say it does not occur at all. In Germany, on the other hand, it is seen everywhere, and there, indeed, it is the national plan: in Italy it is also found constantly. In Spain, however, it was quite as much the national ground-plan as it was in Germany; almost everywhere we see it, and in any case the fact is of value as proving that the Spaniards adopted their own national form of Gothic, and were not indebted solely to their nearest neighbours, the French, for their inspiration and education in architecture, though undoubtedly they owed them very much.