Cartagena Cathedral, also known as Santa María la Vieja, is a ruin rather than an active cathedral, and that gives it a strange power. It stands above the Roman Theatre on a site where Roman, medieval, and modern Cartagena overlap almost too neatly.
The building was badly damaged during the Spanish Civil War and remains partly open to the sky. Seen from the theatre below, its broken walls make one of the city's defining images: antiquity, war, and restoration all stacked on the same hillside.