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Church of San Juan de Amandi

Villaviciosa, Gijón, Asturias

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Church of San Juan de Amandi

Monument · Villaviciosa, Gijón, Asturias

Church of San Juan de Amandi

The church of San Juan de Amandi stands at the Algara farmstead, in the maliaya parish of Amandi, in the municipality of Villaviciosa. Dating from the first third of the 13th century, with a single nave and a semicircular apse covered by an oven vault, it concentrates so much carving in its doorways, capitals, corbels and triumphal arch that it has been called the Sistine chapel of Asturian Romanesque. Tradition places an earlier 9th-century temple here, and in 1201 Alfonso IX and his wife Berenguela donated it to the monastery of Valdediós. In the 18th century the apse was dismantled and reassembled stone by stone, and the porch that surrounds it on the south and west was added. Burned during the Civil War, it was repaired under the direction of Luis Menéndez-Pidal, who replaced the ribbed vaults with wooden frameworks.

Photo: Zarateman (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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