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Fortified church of Santa Maria de Vilamacolum

Vilamacolum, Alt Empordà, Girona

1 Villages · 1 Monuments

Spain › Catalonia › Girona › Alt Empordà › Vilamacolum › Fortified church of Santa Maria de Vilamacolum

Fortified church of Santa Maria de Vilamacolum

Monument · Vilamacolum, Alt Empordà, Girona

Fortified Romanesque church, documented since 1094, on the outskirts of Vilamacolum, on the road toward Sant Pere Pescador, and declared a Bien Cultural de Interés Nacional (Catalonia's highest level of heritage protection). With a single nave and semicircular apse, it was built in two stages: the chancel and a short stretch of the nave, from the 11th century, and the rest of the walls, from the 12th and 13th centuries, a period in which two side chapels were added and the building was fortified with walls that doubled the height of the original Romanesque ones, a reform that testifies to the medieval insecurity of the Empordà plain. On the façade, remodelled in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Romanesque arch of the earlier portal is preserved, and a bell-gable rises above it. In the apse, the oldest part, a window opens beneath a quarter-sphere vault.

Photo: Albert Sarola Juanola (CC BY-SA 3.0 es)

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