The forty-metre stone bell tower of Santa Maria is the unmistakable landmark of Puigcerdà's skyline. It is also a memorial: the medieval Gothic church it once belonged to was destroyed during the Civil War in 1936, and only the tower was rebuilt. The plaza it stands in is now an open square where the body of the church used to be.
The tower itself can be climbed by appointment in summer for sweeping views over the Cerdanya valley. At ground level the surviving Romanesque doorway hints at what the church looked like — austere, rural, much older than the town's nineteenth-century summer mansions suggest.