Palencia Cathedral

Palencia Cathedral — La Bella Desconocida, the Beautiful Unknown — is one of the great Gothic churches of Spain, and the fact that it receives only a tiny fraction of the visitors that go to Burgos or León makes it all the more rewarding. The building was begun in the late 14th century and completed over the following 200 years, resulting in a cathedral of exceptional coherence and quality. The exterior is plain to the point of austerity, which does nothing to prepare you for the richness of the interior.

Inside, the cathedral holds an extraordinary collection of art accumulated over 600 years: El Greco's San Sebastián, a superb Gothic altarpiece by Juan de Flandes (court painter to Isabella the Catholic), choir stalls of great delicacy, and the Flemish tapestries in the sacristy. The spacious nave gives a cleaner sense of Gothic proportion than the more elaborate cathedrals. Palencia's residents are rightly proud of this building, and rightly puzzled that so few outsiders bother to come.

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A story
The cathedral is built over the Visigothic crypt of San Antolín, a 7th-century underground chamber that predates the Gothic building above it by eight centuries. Legend says that Sancho III of Navarre, hunting in the area in 1034, fell into the crypt when his horse stumbled through the entrance — and in gratitude for his survival, he founded a church on the site. The crypt, with its Visigothic columns and capitals, can still be visited below the main nave.