San Román is the building that carries the first third of Toledo’s story, the part most visitors miss entirely because they arrive looking for synagogues and cathedrals.
The church was consecrated in 1221 by Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada — the archbishop who laid out the Gothic cathedral five years later, and who wrote the chronicle most of what we know about thirteenth-century Castile comes from. What he consecrated was not Gothic at all: it is the standard example of the first Toledan Mudéjar, brick and horseshoe arches, and the arcades stand on capitals reused from earlier buildings, some of them Corinthian in inspiration, robbed from the Roman and Visigothic city. The free-standing tower at the west end was built at the end of the thirteenth century and is modelled directly on caliphal minarets.
The wall paintings date from the last quarter of the thirteenth century and cover the nave: saints, scenes of death and resurrection, the Last Judgement and Paradise. They are painted in a manner that was already old-fashioned when they were made, in a church of Islamic construction, for a Castilian congregation. Stand at the west end and take them as a single sweep before you look at anything in a case.
Since 1968 the building has housed the Museo de los Concilios y la Cultura Visigoda — the Museum of the Councils and Visigothic Culture, named for the church councils held at Toledo when it was the capital of Visigothic Spain, among them the third council of 589 at which King Reccared abandoned Arianism. The collection is architectural and epigraphic: carved capitals, reliefs, inscriptions and other material from the Visigothic city.
Manage one expectation. The votive crowns of Guarrazar, the great Visigothic gold treasure dug up a few kilometres from here in 1858, are not in this museum: they are in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional in Madrid and the Musée de Cluny in Paris. What is here is the stone city, not the gold.
Admission is listed by Toledo’s tourism office as free, temporarily. The hours are split by a long lunch — check them before you walk up.
