Arahal – Vera Cruz Church

Vera Cruz Church

The Vera Cruz Church (Church of the Holiest True Cross) is located at the Veracruz St. in the locality of Arahal, province of Seville.

Building started, in the baroque style, on this church in 1756 and it was consecrated on the 25th of December 1780. The current church was built to replace and old hermitage that was destroyed by the Lisbon Earthquake in 1755. There are record of t his building going back to the end of the 15th century. After being deconsecrated in 1936, the church was returned to religious use by Fray Carlos Amigo Vallejo, Cardinal of Seville, in a ceremony on the 20th of November 2004. It is also currently the home of the Hermandad
(Brotherhood) of the same name.

It is the only central-floored religious building in the town and is notable for its curious and valuable façade with bricks worked in colonial style, executed by the master builders of Fuentes de Andalucia. It is also notable for the cornices inside the building.

Church Features

The doorway in fine carved brick is made up of double balustraded columns superimposed on flanked pilasters that support finials, arranged at an angle on each of the sides of the wide access opening, which is closed with a mixtilinear arch with thick moldings. The columns, supported on powerful stone pedestals, are grooved in their first third and balustrades in the rest. The capitals in the form of a square with a curved side are uncarved. It has a pendant in the key of the arch, supported by a wooden cross, which replaces a primitive one also in wood. The auctions are made up of four cups of baked clay with two figures of dragons carved on their sides, as handles.

Finally, framing the sides and emphasizing the decoration of the whole, it is finished off with highly dynamic moldings, also in carved brick, which serve as a transition between the monumental portal and the wall. Crowning the front of the church on a curved pediment, stands the belfry, which consists of a semicircular arch, where the bell is located. The opening is framed by two lateral pilasters, which end in a small cornice and on which a curved pediment rests, divided by a pedestal. This pedestal is the base of an ornament that is made up of three stepped cups on pedestals. The set of the belfry is topped laterally by a pair of flat scrolls supported on a plinth.

The dome stands out for its graceful and airy warped roof of Arab tiles, with an octagonal floor plan, outlined by its eight ridges of blue and white glazed ceramic tiles, from which a dome or blind lantern is born, culminating in an iron weathervane cross. The dome is supported by an octagonal drum, attached to the hemispherical interior dome, topped by a cornice of corbels around the entire upper perimeter and flanked at its eight edges by pinjantes and brick finishes. In turn, the drum is supported by four interior buttresses, which correspond externally with the lines of the buttresses. Read more…