Girona Cathedral

Where it sits. The Cathedral of Saint Mary crowns the highest point of Girona's walled old town, on the site of the Roman forum and, before the reconquest of the city in 785, of a mosque. It is approached from Placa de la Catedral by a Baroque staircase of ninety steps built between 1607 and 1690, which rises in three flights and lifts the church roughly fifteen metres above the square. The effect is deliberate and theatrical: from the bottom the facade fills the field of view, and from the top the medieval roofs of the Call fall away to the Onyar. The Passeig de la Muralla, the walkway along the medieval walls, passes immediately behind the apse.

The widest Gothic nave in the world. The cathedral's celebrated feature is structural rather than decorative. Work began in 1312 in the standard three-aisled Gothic manner under the master Enric de Narbona, and the ambulatory and chevet were completed on that plan. In 1416, with the nave still unbuilt, the chapter convened twelve of the leading architects of the Crown of Aragon to settle a dispute: should the nave continue in three aisles, or be thrown across as a single vault? The single-nave option, championed by the master mason Guillem Bofill, won by a narrow margin and was executed. The result spans 22.98 metres — the widest Gothic nave anywhere, and the second widest masonry vault of any style after Saint Peter's in Rome. Standing inside, the absence of columns is disorienting: the space reads as a hall rather than a church.

What survives from earlier churches. The Romanesque bell tower, known as the Tower of Charlemagne, and the trapezoidal cloister beside it both belong to the eleventh and twelfth centuries and were kept when the Gothic church rose around them. The cloister's capitals carry one of Catalonia's richest programmes of Romanesque carving — Genesis scenes, labours of the months, beasts and grotesques — and its irregular plan, forced by the slope, gives four galleries of unequal length. The treasury holds two objects of the first rank: the Beatus of Girona, an illuminated commentary on the Apocalypse completed in 975 by the scribe Senior and the painter Ende, one of the few named women artists of the early Middle Ages; and the Tapestry of Creation, an embroidered wall hanging of about 1100 showing Christ Pantocrator ringed by the days of creation, the winds and the months.

The facade and its long finish. The Baroque west front was begun in 1606 and advanced with such reluctance that the rose window was only completed in 1961. It is faced in local stone that turns from grey to warm gold in the late afternoon, framed by niches of saints and topped by a single bell. Purists find it a mismatch for the Gothic body behind it. Photographers, and one television production, found it exactly right.

On screen. In the summer of 2015 the cathedral staircase and facade were dressed as the Great Sept of Baelor in King's Landing for the sixth season of Game of Thrones. The sequence appears in the sixth episode, Blood of My Blood: Jaime Lannister rides his horse up the ninety steps to confront the High Sparrow while the Tyrell host masses in the square below and Margaery Tyrell appears at the top beside him. The facade was digitally altered to give the Sept its dome and the square was extended in post-production, but the staircase itself is unchanged and is public space, free to walk at any hour. It has become the most photographed spot in the city, and the crowd on the lower flight in high season is heavy from mid-morning.

Sant Feliu below. The same ticket admits the basilica of Sant Feliu at the foot of the cathedral steps, and it earns the ten minutes. Built over the tomb of the city's martyr and originally outside the Roman wall, it has a Gothic body on a Romanesque plan, a truncated bell tower whose spire was destroyed by lightning in 1581 and never rebuilt, and eight Roman and early Christian sarcophagi set high into the presbytery walls — reused, carved with hunting scenes and the rape of Proserpina, and centuries older than the church around them.

Visiting and timing. A single ticket covers the nave, the cloister, the treasury and the basilica of Sant Feliu below, and includes an audio guide; the church is open daily with shortened hours on Sundays and during services, and admission is free on certain days each week. Allow ninety minutes to do the treasury justice. The steps make the interior difficult for wheelchair users, though a side entrance from the Pia Almoina courtyard offers step-free access on request. April to June and September to October give the best light and the smallest queues. During the Temps de Flors festival in May the staircase is covered with a flower installation, which is spectacular and makes the classic view impossible.