A Visigothic cathedral of Santa María stood on this ground. After 711 it carried the city’s Friday mosque, the aljama, and the surrender terms Alfonso VI granted in 1085 guaranteed that mosque to Toledo’s Muslims. The chronicles say that in 1087, while the king was away, Archbishop Bernard of Sedirac and Queen Constance occupied the building and had it consecrated as a church, and that Alfonso rode back intending to burn them for it and was talked out of it by the Muslim jurist Abū l-Walīd. Whatever the truth of the detail, the site is the whole argument of Toledo in one footprint.
The Gothic cathedral was begun in 1226 under Ferdinand III and Archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada — chronicler of De rebus Hispaniae, and present at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 — and finished in 1493. The plan is French, closest to Bourges: five naves, a double ambulatory, and dimensions usually given as 120 m long by 59 m wide with vaults 44.5 m high. The Toledan detail is overhead in the triforium, where the arcading runs to multifoil arches of Almohad type, cut by local masons into a French cathedral.
Give the choir in the middle of the nave more time than feels reasonable. Rodrigo Alemán carved the lower stalls between 1489 and 1495 with fifty-four panels of the war of Granada, one conquered town per panel, worked while the campaign was still running — a documentary relief carved almost as it happened. The upper tier is Renaissance, by Alonso Berruguete and Felipe Vigarny.
Behind the high altar, Narciso Tomé’s Transparente of 1729–32 cuts a hole clean through the ambulatory vault so that daylight lands on the back of the tabernacle; it is unapologetically Baroque and it is the one Baroque thing here nobody should skip. The Sacristy holds El Greco’s Espolio, painted for that room in 1577–79. The Treasury holds Enrique de Arfe’s monstrance of about 1515–24, still carried through the streets at Corpus Christi.
In the corner by the cloister door is the Capilla Mozárabe, endowed by Cardinal Cisneros in 1504 to keep the Hispano-Mozarabic rite alive after Rome suppressed it everywhere else. It is still sung every morning — Monday to Saturday at 09:00, Sundays and feasts at 09:45. That is a service and not a visit, and it is the only way most people will ever get inside the chapel.
