Guadalajara's Cathedral

The Guadalajara Cathedral is distinguished by two brilliant, yellow-tiled Neo-Gothic spires that rise sharply above the city's historic center. These towers are not original to the seventeenth-century Spanish Renaissance structure but were added in eighteen fifty-four. They replaced the previous set of towers, which, along with the cathedral’s dome, crumbled during a violent earthquake in eighteen eighteen. Another tremor in eighteen forty-nine finished the destruction of those early replacements, leaving the cathedral in a state of long-term disrepair until architect Manuel Gómez Ibarra designed the current, sun-catching spires.