The cathedral sits on the site of Granada's main mosque, in the center of what had been the Muslim Medina. This was deliberate: like many Andalusian cathedrals, it replaced the most important Islamic religious structure in the city, a physical assertion of the new order. The first architect, Enrique Egas, laid Gothic foundations beginning in 1518, designing a building consistent with the Royal Chapel of Granada he had already completed nearby, where the remains of Ferdinand and Isabella would eventually rest. But by 1529, the project's direction changed dramatically when Egas was replaced by Diego de Siloe, an architect who would work on the cathedral for nearly four decades and transform it into something unprecedented.

Siloe's great innovation was the capilla mayor -- the principal chapel. Where convention called for a semicircular apse, Siloe created a fully circular chapel, an idea rooted in Italian Renaissance theories of the perfect building that ultimately traced back to Alberti and the architectural circles of Rome. He combined this circular form with a Gothic floor plan, joining two geometric traditions that had never been married in quite this way. The cathedral has five naves instead of the usual three, all staggered in height with the central nave tallest, and Siloe planned a triforium -- an arcaded gallery -- running above the arcade. The result is a space that feels both vast and unified, the Renaissance dome drawing the eye upward while the multiplied naves extend the space laterally. Subsequent architects built on Siloe's vision: Juan de Maena worked from 1563 to 1571, Juan de Orea from 1571 to 1590, and Ambrosio de Vico from 1590 onward.

In 1667, more than a century after Siloe began reshaping the interior, the painter and architect Alonso Cano turned his attention to the main facade. Working with Gaspar de la Pena, Cano introduced Baroque elements that layered yet another architectural language onto the building. The facade is structured as a framed triumphal arch, with three pillars crowned by semicircular arches supported on pilasters -- a form reminiscent of Alberti's San Andrea in Mantua. Above the main door, a marble tondo depicts the Annunciation, and a vase of lilies at the summit alludes to the Virgin Mary. The pilasters lack conventional capitals, replaced instead by sculptural projections in the walls and attached marble medallions, giving the facade a quality of ornamental restraint unusual for the Baroque period.

Inside, the dome provides the cathedral's most striking visual moment. Gold stars on a deep blue field cover its surface, surrounding a central oculus ringed by petal shapes. The effect is of looking up into a stylized night sky, a motif that connects to both Christian celestial symbolism and the older Islamic tradition of geometric star patterns that once decorated the buildings this cathedral replaced. Granada Cathedral is not the most famous building in a city dominated by the Alhambra, but it is in many ways the most revealing -- a structure that required 181 years and at least seven architects to complete, each one adjusting the vision of his predecessors, none willing to demolish what came before. The result is not a unified masterpiece but something richer: a physical record of how a city remade itself, stone by stone, across nearly two centuries.