The Church of San Mateo stands at the highest point of the Ciudad Monumental and is the oldest of the major churches within the old walls, begun in the fourteenth century on the site of the main Moorish mosque. The Gothic exterior is austere and buttressed, with a fine rose window above the main portal; inside, the proportions are generous, with a single wide nave and a series of elaborate Renaissance funerary chapels built by the noble families of the city.
The Capilla Mayor (main chapel) was donated by the Ovando family and contains fine sixteenth-century carvings. Several of the side chapels contain heraldic tombs of conquistadors and their families, the effigies recording faces and armour in considerable detail. The church functions as a kind of record of who mattered in Cáceres between 1300 and 1600.
The square in front of San Mateo — the Plaza de San Mateo — is one of the quiet corners of the old town, without the tourist concentration of the main plaza, and a good place to sit and read the layered history around you.