Jerez de la Frontera Cathedral

Start at the foot of the steps. The stone under your shoes is pale and worn smooth, and on a warm afternoon it gives back the heat of the Andalusian sun. Somewhere nearby, swifts are calling over the rooftops. And if the breeze is right, you may catch something unexpected for a cathedral square: the sweet, slightly nutty smell of sherry drifting from the old wine cellars just down the hill.

This is the Cathedral of Jerez de la Frontera, dedicated to the Saviour, San Salvador in Spanish. It rises at the top of a broad flight of steps, and its size is a surprise in a town that otherwise feels low and whitewashed. Take a moment before you climb. Notice how the building fills your view, with its towers, its buttresses and its great central dome, all in honey-coloured stone that changes tone as the light moves.

Here is the first thing most visitors miss. This church has only been a cathedral for a few decades. For most of its life it was a collegiate church. That is a large church served by a group of clergy, but without a bishop of its own. The title of cathedral came in the late twentieth century, when the Catholic Church created a new diocese centred on Jerez. So the building is old, but its cathedral rank is young.

The ground beneath it is older still. Jerez was an important town under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages, and tradition holds that its principal mosque stood on or near this spot. After the Christian conquest in the thirteenth century, it was common across Andalusia to turn a main mosque into a church. Over the following centuries, that first church was replaced. The building you see today rose slowly over a very long period.

That long period shows in the stone. Construction stretched across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the architects did not all share one taste. So the cathedral mixes styles. You can see Gothic ideas in the soaring structure and the external buttresses, Baroque energy in the decorated doorways, and the calmer lines of Neoclassicism, a style that looked back to ancient Greece and Rome, in some of the later finishing. Look closely and you can almost read the decades.

Now turn your attention to the bell tower. It does not touch the main church. It stands apart, on its own, a short walk across the square. This is another detail that puzzles first-time visitors. The tower is older than the cathedral beside it, a survivor from an earlier phase of building. Its lower parts are plain and solid, and its upper sections carry a different decorative character. Compare its stone and its proportions with the main building, and the difference in age becomes clear.

Climb the steps now, and pause at the top. Turn around. From here you look down over the square and towards the rooftops of the old town. Close by, behind its walls, is the Alcázar, the old Moorish fortress of Jerez, with its gardens and towers. Standing here, you are between the medieval fortress and the great church that replaced the mosque. The whole story of the city sits within a few hundred metres.

Inside, the light changes completely. After the glare of the square, the interior feels cool and dim, and your eyes need a moment to adjust. The space is divided into five naves, long aisles running from the entrance towards the altar, separated by tall columns. Look up. The vaults are high and patterned, and at the crossing the dome opens above you. On bright days, light falls from its windows onto the stone floor below.

The cathedral holds a quiet treasure that many visitors walk past. Look for a painting by Francisco de Zurbarán, one of the great Spanish painters of the seventeenth century. It shows the Virgin Mary as a young child, asleep, her head resting on her hand. It is a small, tender image, very different from the grand religious scenes you might expect. Zurbarán was known for calm figures and soft, careful light, and this work shows that gift clearly.

As you walk the aisles, take time with the side chapels. Each one has its own altar, its own carved and gilded woodwork, and its own devotional images. Some of these images are carried through the streets during Holy Week, the week before Easter, when brotherhoods from across Jerez process with candles, music and slow drumbeats. Even out of season, the worn steps and the candle stands near these chapels show how often local people still come to pray.

Now for the second surprise. Jerez is the home of sherry, the fortified wine that gave the town its fame abroad. Every September, during the grape harvest festival, the cathedral steps become a stage. In a long tradition, grapes are trodden by foot in front of the church, and the first juice of the year is blessed. Few cathedrals anywhere in Europe have such a close bond with a wine. Here, the harvest and the church meet on the same stone.

That bond is no accident of geography. Some of the oldest sherry bodegas, the long whitewashed wine cellars of Jerez, sit just beside the cathedral and the Alcázar. Their tall walls and high roofs are designed to keep the barrels cool. When you leave, walk slowly along the streets around the square. You will see the plain white walls of the cellars and, on some days, smell the wine resting inside the oak.

Before you go, stand once more at the top of the steps. Look at the free-standing tower, the old fortress beyond, the rooftops falling away towards the cellars. Listen for the bells, the swifts, the voices in the square below. This building took generations to finish, and it changed its title only recently. But the town around it has gathered here for centuries. As you walk down the steps, you become part of that long, unhurried story.