Church of Santa María del Alcor

Descripción

The Parish Church of Santa María del Alcor is located in one of the highest points of the town, in the historic center.

It belongs to the Sevillian Mudejar style and we can frame it at the end of the fifteenth century or early sixteenth century. Possibly it is seated on the remains of a Franciscan hermitage and a Muslim marabout.

The building has suffered many vicissitudes throughout history, such as a fire in the seventeenth century, Lisbon earthquake in 1755, expansion in the eighteenth century, looting in the Civil War…

The temple has a floor plan with three naves (the central one twice as large as the lateral ones) separated by cruciform pillars, on which rest semicircular arches with alfiz, and a polygonal chevet crowned with a Renaissance dome; the roof, on the other hand, is resolved by a very simple coffered ceiling.

In the interior, at the feet, it has a low choir or sotocoro with a rococo masonry. In the presbytery rises the main altarpiece, recently restored, of neoclassical style, with three streets with two bodies each one, on an enormous bank and crowned by a cornice, presided by the image of the Patron Saint of the town, Santa María del Alcoronada, and the superior Lignum Crucis; to the sides of the altarpiece stand out two enormous canvases with paintings of the XVII century of Venetian influence, that represent Santa Catalina and San Francisco de Asís receiving the stigmata. On the Gospel side, the Chapel of Christ of Love, the oldest part of the temple, a Renaissance altarpiece (presided by St. Jude Thaddeus), the Sacristy, with a carved wooden chest of drawers from the early eighteenth century, and the Sacramental Chapel, with a neoclassical altarpiece presided by the image of the Virgin of Sorrows. On the side of the epistle, the Renaissance altarpiece of San José, the Chapel that houses in niches the images of Nuestro Padre Jesús Cautivo and the Virgen de la Amargura, a Chapel with the Heart of Jesus in a neo-baroque altarpiece and a neoclassical altarpiece that is presided over by the image of the Virgen del Carmen.

On the exterior it presents straight and staggered profiles with great sobriety, a gabled roof in the central nave and one water on the sides, the hemispherical vault of the presbytery is covered with a dome, and the bell tower is typical of those of the second half of the eighteenth century in the area, with two pilasters on each side of the bell openings. The tower with the bell tower is crowned by the beautiful weather vane of San Miguel Arcángel.