The Cathedral of the Holy Cross was built by the Crusaders in the 12th century on the site of an earlier Byzantine church, itself built over earlier structures. At its peak it was one of the major cathedral churches of the Latin East — the kings of Jerusalem were crowned here, including Amalric I in 1162. The building was later converted into a mosque after Saladin's forces took Tyre in 1187 (briefly), and then again after the Mamluks expelled the Crusaders permanently in 1291. What remains today is a substantial footprint of walls, columns, and architectural fragments within the broader Al-Mina excavation zone.
The ruins give a sense of the cathedral's original scale, which was considerable. Architectural details — carved capitals, dressed limestone blocks, column bases — appear alongside the Roman material that predates it by a thousand years. The site illustrates how completely each era in Tyre's history was built on and over the previous one. The cathedral is not separately ticketed but is part of the Al-Mina site visit.