Lleida cathedral on the hill
— a cathedral that watches the plain.
Not only on a wall.
Lleida cathedral on the hill, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“La Seu Vella stands on a low hill above the city of Lleida, looking south across the Segre toward the Catalan plain. The cathedral is thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Gothic, with a freestanding bell tower nearly sixty metres tall and a cloister set unusually before the church rather than beside it. The hill was a citadel for much of the modern era, which left the building roofless and used as barracks until restoration began in the twentieth century. — from the studio
The place, in three passes.
La Seu Vella, the Old Cathedral of Lleida, sits on the Turó de la Seu Vella, a low hill about seventy metres above the Segre River in western Catalonia. The building was begun in 1203 on the site of an earlier mosque and consecrated in 1278, with the cloister and bell tower finished across the fourteenth century. It served as the principal church of the city until 1707, when Philip V's forces converted the hilltop into a military citadel after the War of the Spanish Succession and the cathedral chapter moved down to a new church in the lower town.
The cathedral is a transitional building, Romanesque in plan with early Gothic ribbed vaulting overhead. The bell tower, finished in 1431, rises about sixty metres above the hill in an octagonal shaft. The cloister sits unusually on the western side, before the nave rather than alongside it, and opens to the plain through pointed traceried windows. Local sandstone takes a warm honey colour in late light and reads almost grey under cloud. The roof was removed during the citadel years and the interior was only re-covered in the second half of the twentieth century.
The hill is reached on foot from the lower town in about twenty minutes by a switchback walk, or by a short elevator from the Carrer del Sant Crist. The cathedral and the surrounding fortifications form the Conjunt Monumental de la Seu Vella, managed by the Generalitat de Catalunya and open most days year round. The bell tower is climbable, two hundred and thirty-eight steps to the open belfry, which looks across the city and out over the Segre plain. The hill was added to Spain's UNESCO tentative list in 2019.
