You can see La Seu from the water, from the ring road, from a plane on final approach, and from most of the rooftops in the old town. It is the image Palma sells itself with. It is also, more quietly, the reason the streets behind it look the way they do.
Eight hundred years, and counting
Work began in 1229, immediately after Jaume I took the island, and the building was not largely finished until the early seventeenth century. Four hundred years of Catalan Gothic, built on the edge of the old sea wall so that it stands over the water rather than behind the town.
Its rose window is one of the largest in the Gothic world. On a clear morning the whole nave is coloured by it.
Gaudí’s interruption
Between 1904 and 1914 Antoni Gaudí was brought in to reorganise the interior. He moved the choir, opened up the sightlines to the altar, reworked the lighting and hung the canopy that still floats above it. The commission ended in a disagreement and was never finished — which is why the inside of La Seu is part medieval cathedral and part unfinished Gaudí, and more interesting for it.
The figure of eight
Twice a year, on 2 February and 11 November, the rising sun comes through the rose window at an angle that projects its mirror image onto the wall below the opposite window. For a few minutes the two circles stack into a figure eight. People queue at dawn for it, and it is worth the alarm clock once.
What it means for a house nearby
The cathedral is not only a view. Its presence is written into the planning rules for everything around it. Inside the protected quarter — Calatrava, the lanes immediately behind La Seu — facades, rooflines and listed interiors are fixed, and nothing is built above the historic roofline.
The practical consequence is simple. A roof terrace with a clear line to the cathedral cannot be built out by a neighbour, because the neighbour cannot build up. There is no vacant plot in these streets and there will not be one. The supply is what it is, and it has been for six hundred years.
That is the quiet argument for owning inside the walls rather than near them. Every home we take on in Palma is measured, filmed and checked before anyone is asked to travel.
