Cadaqués is a small fishing village. That's exactly why what's inside its church is so disorienting: a Baroque altarpiece twenty-three metres tall and twelve wide, carved and gilded down to the last centimetre, considered one of the most important Baroque altarpieces in Catalonia. It's in Santa Maria, right at the top of the village, and seeing it just takes a walk uphill. The story of how it got there — who made it, why it was delayed, and how long it took to gild — says a lot about what this place was three hundred years ago.
Twenty-three metres in a village church
The main altarpiece of the Santa Maria parish measures 23 metres high by 12 wide and is considered one of the most important Baroque ensembles in Catalonia. It's presided over by the image of the Mare de Déu de l'Esperança, the village's patron saint, depicted according to an iconography inspired by the Apocalypse.
The mismatch between the work and the size of the village is the telling detail. A rural parish doesn't pay for an altarpiece like this on its own: it's paid for by a community of seafaring people with money, at a time when maritime trade in the Empordà moved far more than the place suggests today.
A war in the way
The work had been planned since 1705, but the War of the Spanish Succession got in the way, and the contract with the sculptors wasn't signed until 1723. Eighteen years' wait because of a war: it's the kind of detail that turns an art-history fact into a story about people who wanted something and had to wait for whatever was happening to be over.
The carving was carried out between 1723 and 1729 by sculptors Joan Torras and Pau Costa. Pau Costa is one of the great names of Catalan Baroque, the author of several major altarpieces of the period; that he worked here is another measure of the ambition behind the commission.
Sixty years to gild it
The carving was finished in 1729, but the gilding of the whole piece wasn't completed until 1770-1788. In other words: the altarpiece stood finished in bare wood, ungilded, for decades, and the finish was paid for bit by bit over nearly three generations.
That, too, tells you something about the village. The gold on an altarpiece was funded in instalments, according to what was available. The people who commissioned the work never saw it finished; their grandchildren did. Few things explain better how these things got built: not as a project, but as an inherited commitment.
Going up to see it
The church sits at the top of the old town, and its façade is crowned by a square-based bell tower with an octagonal upper section, made up of two tiers stacked over a kind of domed, scrolled canopy. The climb up the cobbled alleys is already worth the walk on its own.
Check the opening hours before you go, since a village parish doesn't open around the clock, and hours change with the season. It's worth going in with time to spare and looking from bottom to top, slowly: there's a great deal to see in twenty-three metres of carving, and the first impression will swallow everything else if you don't pause.