Historical Builder › Cathedrals › Seville Cathedral
How Long Did It Take to Build Seville Cathedral?
Short answer: about 116 years, from 1403 to 1519.
In 1401 the chapter is said to have vowed to build a church so grand that people would take them for mad.
What the sources say about the building period
Founded 1403 on the site of a former mosque (some sources give 1401); Gothic and Renaissance building, part of the UNESCO complex with the Alcázar and Archivo de Indias. UNESCO World Heritage Centre Official source
Stone and crew in numbers
- Country and type
- Spain, cathedral
- Stone in the walls
- 90,000 to 150,000 m³ Estimate
- For comparison
- about 48 Olympic pools of stone, or 12,000 truckloads
- Average crew
- about 124 workers (model value: the crew that would need exactly this long, working without a break)
Volume basis: 126 x 83 m; nave 30–37 m high; Giralda not counted. Checked against measurements. Our estimates come from published dimensions and are shown as a range. The result is a simple model, not a measured fact.
Where the stone came from
Mainly calcarenite from the quarries of the Sierra de San Cristobal at El Puerto de Santa Maria, followed by limestone from Espera. In the early 15th century the blocks reached Seville by river. Materiales de Construcción 1990: stone of Seville Cathedral, Trocadero (Universidad de Cádiz): works and quarries 1400 to 1430 Academic source
Plan
Legend: tradition, not evidence
The cathedral chapter declared in 1401: "Let us build a church so beautiful and so grand that those who see it finished will take us for mad."
What we know: The minutes of 8 July 1401 are lost. An 1801 historian recorded a simpler wording, "one so good that none will be its equal". The famous version appears in print in 1692 at the earliest we found.
Wikipedia: Seville Cathedral, Hans Gerwitz: Let them deem us mad Tradition, not evidence
Build it yourself
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