Cathedral of St. Mary the Crowned

The Cathedral of St Mary the Crowned — in Spanish, the Catedral de Santa María la Coronada — is the Roman Catholic cathedral of Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula. The primary centre of Catholic worship in the Diocese of Gibraltar, it stands on Main Street in the heart of the town, and it is a building of extraordinary historical depth, for it occupies the site of the great mosque of the medieval Moorish city, and it is the one place in Gibraltar where Catholic worship has continued without a break since the Christian reconquest. Few churches anywhere gather so much of a place's tangled history into one building.

The cathedral's origins lie in the Moorish and Spanish periods of Gibraltar's history. Just after the city was reconquered from the Moors, the main mosque was stripped of its Islamic features and consecrated as the parish church, dedicated to St Mary the Crowned. Under the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, the old building was demolished and a new church was erected in the Gothic style; but the small courtyard of the cathedral survives as a remnant of the larger court of the original mosque, and the coat of arms of the Catholic Monarchs, placed in the courtyard, can still be seen there today — tangible links to the Moorish and Spanish past of the Rock.

The church's most remarkable distinction dates from 1704, when Gibraltar was captured by an Anglo-Dutch force during the War of the Spanish Succession, and most of the Spanish population left. In the disorder that followed, St Mary the Crowned was the only Catholic church or institution in the town that was not ransacked, successfully protected by its staunch pastor, Juan Romero, together with his curate and his bell-ringer. As a result, it is the only place in Gibraltar where Catholic worship has taken place uninterruptedly from the definite Christian reconquest of the town through to the present day — a continuity of which the cathedral is justly proud, and which made it the natural centre of Catholic life under British rule, for Gibraltar's largely Catholic population continued to practise their faith freely.

The building suffered severely during the Great Siege of 1779–1783, when Spain and France besieged the Rock for nearly four years. In 1790 the governor, Sir Robert Boyd, offered to rebuild the damaged cathedral in return for part of the land on which it stood, so that Main Street could be straightened and widened; the street was remodelled accordingly, and the cathedral was rebuilt on its reduced site in 1810. The clock tower was added in 1820, and in 1931 the cathedral was restored and given its present west façade, replacing the poorer front of 1810. The church thus took on essentially the form it has today, a dignified building at the heart of the bustling town.

The cathedral has not been without its dramas. In 1881 it was the scene of nearly fifty arrests, when the governor of Gibraltar sent police and soldiers to support the Bishop, Canilla, as he attempted to enter his own cathedral against the resistance of a self-appointed "Committee of Elders", who had hoped to install their own priest — a vivid episode in the often complicated relations between church, state and community in the territory. Through all such events, the cathedral has remained the mother church of Catholic Gibraltar, and it continues today as the active cathedral of the diocese, the focus of Catholic worship for the people of the Rock.

The cathedral stands on Main Street in the centre of Gibraltar, the famous British territory dominated by the great limestone mass of the Rock of Gibraltar, guarding the entrance to the Mediterranean. The Rock, with its Barbary macaques — the only wild monkeys in Europe — its caves and its tunnels, rises above the town; the Moorish Castle, the Great Siege Tunnels, St Michael's Cave, the Upper Rock Nature Reserve, Europa Point with its views across the strait to Africa, and the bustling, cosmopolitan streets of the town are all close at hand, in one of the most strategic and storied places in Europe.

From the great mosque of the Moorish city, through its consecration as a church, its rebuilding by the Catholic Monarchs, its survival as the one Catholic church not ransacked in 1704, the damage of the Great Siege and the rebuilding that straightened Main Street, to its restoration in 1931, the Cathedral of St Mary the Crowned gathers the whole layered history of Gibraltar — Moorish, Spanish and British — into one building. The seat of the Bishop of Gibraltar and the only place of uninterrupted Catholic worship on the Rock, it remains the spiritual heart of Catholic Gibraltar, on Main Street beneath the great Rock at the gateway to the Mediterranean.