The Cathedral of Salamanca renovates its presbytery

Image of the new presbytery. Project management, liturgical furnishings and seating made by GRANDA.

At 1793the altarpiece of the Main Chapel of the New Cathedral of Salamanca.by Alberto Churriguera and completed only eleven years earlier, it was disassembled. It was planned to replace it with a marble tabernacle designed by Ventura Rodriguez that would be located in the transept under the dome. However, the project could not be carried out due to its high cost. And so it remained for more than two centuries.

A GRANDA was entrusted with the task of adapting the presbytery of the Mayo Chapelr. A space of these characteristics demanded a rigorous and respectful intervention that would meet the current needs of the liturgy and in which the dialogue between the different elements would form a harmonious whole in which each of them would also stand out on its own.

The project presented by GRANDA consisted of the use of a current language to enter into dialogue with the existing one. A language able to express the contents of the faith by going to the essential and eliminating the superfluous, through architectural or plastic resources that would endow it with a character capable of to stimulate devotion.

The intervention was carried out in three cores On the one hand, it has been reviewed and the altar and the amboThe project was to offer a proposal that would take up the compositional lines of the building but transferred to a modern language. Located in the main building, elevated by a platform, they should enhance the view of the historic altar located there, not annul it.

It was then resolved the chair as a functional element and as an organizing element. Finally, and as a tableauThe current crimson velvet canopy has been maintained, on which appears the image of the Virgin of the Assumption from Esteban de Rueda 1624, polychrome by Antonio Gonzalez. The angels that accompany it are by Francisco Sánchez. Eight images of the Fathers of the Church (from the East and the European West) have been incorporated, coming from the disappeared altarpiece. The tabernacle of marble and jasper by Simón Gavilán (1750) and the silver urns with the remains of St. John of Sahagún and St. Thomas of Villanueva.