Qualla: Vic Cathedral

Vic Cathedral: Introduction

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pitxiquin, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Catalan painter Josep Maria Sert covered these vast white walls once, filling them with brooding, gold-shadowed canvases. In 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, fire consumed nearly all of it. Sert returned and painted the entire interior a second time, then died before he could finish the last panels. That doubled labor is fitting for a building that has been torn down and raised again for fourteen centuries. Vic Cathedral, officially the Cathedral of St. Peter the Apostle, is a church that refuses to settle into any single era.

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Image: Pitxiquin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vic Cathedral: Fourteen Centuries of Rebuilding

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pitxiquin, CC BY-SA 4.0. A cathedral in Vic is documented as early as the year 516, though no one is certain where that first paleochristian and Visigothic basilica actually stood. It was most likely destroyed during the Arab invasion of 717 to 718. When Count Wilfred the Hairy repopulated the area in 88...

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Image: Pitxiquin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vic Cathedral: Oliba's Romanesque and What Survived

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Enric, CC BY-SA 4.0. A century later, Abbot Oliba rebuilt the cathedral in a monumental Romanesque style, consecrated in 1038 by Archbishop Wilfred of Narbonne. Its bell tower rose 46 meters, standing slightly apart from the main building, and it still stands today, together with the crypt beneath. T...

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Image: Enric | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vic Cathedral: The Neoclassical Gamble

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pitxiquin, CC BY-SA 4.0. By the late 18th century, the old fabric was giving way to a grand new plan. The unusual round church of Santa Maria la Rodona, a sister temple that had stood for centuries, was demolished in 1787 to clear space; its outline is now marked in the pavement of the cathedral square, ...

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Image: Pitxiquin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vic Cathedral: Painted, Burned, Painted Again

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pitxiquin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Between 1926 and 1930, Josep Maria Sert covered the bare interior with enormous oil canvases, and in 1931 the cathedral was declared a Historic Artistic Monument. Five years later, at the start of the Civil War, revolutionary mobs set the church alight; the vaulting collapsed and...

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Image: Pitxiquin | CC BY-SA 4.0

Vic Cathedral: The Tombs and the Bones

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pitxiquin, CC BY-SA 4.0. Along the north side of the temple runs a series of Baroque chapels, the surviving fragment of a 17th-century plan for yet another new cathedral. Under the bell tower, the chapel of Sant Bernat Calbó honors a 13th-century bishop of Vic who rode with James I of Aragon in the conqu...

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Image: Pitxiquin | CC BY-SA 4.0