Burgos Cathedral

Burgos Cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, stands in the former royal capital of Castile on the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela. Burgos became a bishopric in 1075 under Alfonso VI, succeeding the older Visigothic see of Oca, and a first Romanesque cathedral was finished there in 1096.

The present Gothic church was begun in 1221, when King Ferdinand III and Bishop Maurice laid the first stone; a French master builder modelled it on the cathedrals of Paris and Reims, and it was consecrated in 1260.

In the fifteenth century Juan de Colonia raised the openwork spires of the west front; the lantern dome and Chapel of the Constable followed in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Eighteenth-century sacristies and chapels completed the ensemble.