The Santa María Basilica dates back to the fourteenth century and is Alicante city’s oldest religious building. It consists of a single nave, no transept and side chapels between the buttresses.
The Santa Maria Basilica had to be rebuilt after a fire in the fifteenth century, which explains its baroque façade crowned by two asymmetrical towers built in the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.
The façade of this magnificent religious building pictures an image of the Virgin by the sculptor Juan Bautista Borja. Inside, among other elements, the eighteenth-century Rococo altar and the Baptism, Immaculate Conception and Communion chapels are worthy of note. A huge sixteenth century baptismal font and a 1653 Valencian Baroque organ can be found in the Chapter House.
The Museum of Contemporary Art – MACA is next to the Santa Maria Basilica. The Santísima Faz Square and Alicante’s Town Hall are both very close.
6. Alicante. Concatedral de San Nicolás de Bari (3)
The building of the Co-Cathedral of San Nicolas started in 1600, on the site of a former construction. The cathedral is Herrerian Renaissance style and is located in Alicante’s old town.
The church has a Latin cross layout. Inside, the fifteenth century cloister with two baroque doors, the altar and the 45-meter high blue dome stand out. The Communion Chapel, below the dome, is regarded as one of the finest illustrations of Spanish Baroque.
The interior was recently restored to celebrate the exhibition “La Luz de las Imágenes” in Alicante city, whose mission is to recover and disseminate Valencian artistic heritage.
Alicante’s Town Hall and the picturesque neighbourhoods of Santa Cruz and San Roque are very close to the Co-Cathedral of San Nicolas.
The Santa Faz Monastery is a rectangular building with a truncated pyramid volume, located in a hamlet of the same name, 7 km away from the municipality of Alicante.
The compound includes the main church surrounded by the rest of its dependencies. The church’s architectural structure results from a range of renewals, notably an eighteenth-century renovation which gave the monument its current Baroque appearance.
The altarpiece of the main altar is of neo-baroque style. The composer Óscar Esplá and the artist Eusebio Sempere are buried inside. These two figures are the only contemporary personalities to have been buried in the monastery.
The sixteenth century tower is the only element left from the original building. It is located on one side of the monastery’s hortus courtyard, east of the cloister.
The Santa Faz Monastery holds a relic brought from the Vatican in the fifteenth century. Popular tradition holds that it corresponds to a linen with which Veronica dried the bloody face of Jesus on the way to Calvary.
The Hermitage of San Roque is in the neighbourhood of the same name, on the hillside of Santa Barbara Castle. This small building has a basilica layout with a West-East oriented longitudinal axis. It was built in the sixteenth century and restored at the end of the nineteenth century.
There are two side chapels under small barrel vaults, with false buttresses on the outside. Guardiola Picó wished to give the building a neo-medieval character.
The main altar, which houses the ‘Christ of the Gypsies’ is semi-circular. Its diameter is shorter than the nave’s latitude. On the west façade, Guardiola Picó built a bell tower where the 1559 hermitage gate would have been. This almost rectangular-shaped tower is made with ashlar and horizontal brick lines, with a flared door, today blocked off.
The Parque de la Ereta and the Hermitage of Santa Cruz are very close to the Hermitage of San Roque.
The Hermitage of Santa Cruz is located on the hillside of Mount Benacantil, in the singular and picturesque Santa Cruz neighbourhood. It dates back to the last third of the eighteenth century.
It is a small rectangular building. The Santa Cruz procession celebrated on Holy Wednesday leaves from this spot. Costaleros descend carrying four religious processional floats through the steep and narrow streets of Alicante’s old town.
