San Pedro Church

Saint Peter’s Church started being built in 1100, in a Romanesque style, and since then, the building and its decoration have evolved. On the exterior, the triple header, an apse on each of the naves, brings together an amazing sculptoric repertoire with vegetal, fauna and geometric motifs, also including religious scenes like the history of Cain and Abel or the Temptation of Adam. Altogether this would be the first construction stage. At the second of these stages the transept walls were built and at the third, the lateral naves. The artistic criteria gradually changed with time, and the arches started to become evident as the preface to the Gothic tendencies that came to show. Finally, upon completing this Romanesque stage, the dome was raised. St. Peter’s Church is connected to a painful past for the Hebrew community: in Saint Peter’s court, a judgement was celebrated – the incrimiation of the Jews in the case of the Holy Child of the Guards, showing the anti-semitism in the fifteenth century. A child would be taken to receive a series of terrible actions to evoke withcraft, and whomever was guilty, would be sentence to death. This event portrayed the rarity of the coexistence between Jews and Christians in this era. Since then, St. Peter’s Church was declared a National Monument in 1914.