St Ia's Church stands on the edge of the harbour, a large fifteenth-century granite building that has been the parish church of St Ives for over five hundred years. Unusually grand for a Cornish fishing town, it was built by the prosperous merchants of the medieval tin trade and completed around 1480.
The interior is cool and white-washed, with a carved wagon roof and several interesting monuments. The church survived the Civil War, Victorian restoration, and the twentieth century more or less intact. Walking past it at dusk, with the fishing boats tied up a few metres away and the smell of the sea coming in, gives a sense of the town as it has been for centuries.