Málaga Cathedral

Málaga’s cathedral has one bell tower where the plan called for two, and the whole city calls it La Manquita — the one-armed lady. A plaque at the base of the missing tower says the money went to help Britain’s American colonies win their independence. Parish records suggest it went on a road and an aqueduct. Both stories are worth knowing, and only one of them is on the plaque.

Two and a half centuries of building

Construction began in 1528 on the site of the city’s former congregational mosque, under Diego de Siloé, and was first laid out in Gothic terms before turning Renaissance. Work continued in fits and starts for over 250 years, which is why the building reads as Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical at once depending on where you stand. The plan is a Latin cross with three naves of equal height, close to forty-two metres, and a polygonal ambulatory behind the high altar. The completed north tower reaches roughly eighty-seven metres; the south tower stops at about forty.

The missing tower

The popular account is precise and satisfying: in 1779 the cathedral chapter lent money toward Spain’s war against Britain, and by 1781 Charles III had diverted funds earmarked for the cathedral into the American campaign — a sum sometimes put at the modern equivalent of twenty million dollars — associated with the Málaga-born commander Bernardo de Gálvez, who took British-held Florida in 1781. The plaque at the tower’s base says as much. The archival counter-argument is more mundane: parish records and port-tax accounts indicate the money was spent on roads toward Vélez-Málaga and Antequera, the San Telmo aqueduct that brought water to the growing city, and support for widows and orphans of the militias. What is not disputed is that the papal tax authorisation expired in 1782, collections stopped, and the tower has stood unfinished ever since.

What is inside

The interior rewards slow looking more than the exterior does. The choir stalls carry more than forty carved saints, much of the work by Pedro de Mena. The Baroque organs — two great cases with well over four thousand pipes between them — are among the largest in Spain and are still played. Fifteen side chapels line the naves. Beside the cathedral, reached from the museum side, a small garden of orange trees offers the quietest corner in the centre of Málaga.

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