JAÉN

The church of La Magdalena is one of the oldest churches, since it was built at the beginning of the 16th century, on an ancient mosque and a before ancestor worship.

 

It is located in the Magdalena Square, in front of the water source, where happened the great popular legend of the city, Lagarto de la Malena.

   

Its origin was a primitive mosque founded in the 8th century by Abd al-Rahman II, which even the four ships and courtyard are preserved. 

 

The church preserves horseshoe arches and other semicircular arches. On the walls we can see paintings Representing Christian kings and a tombstone. Inside, there is a room with a double door built by the bishop Diego Tavera Ponce de Léon, in 1555.

 

It has four naves divided by pillars and pointed arches. Its floor is an irregular square and its style is much intermingled. In his Elizabethan Gothic façade stands out the image of Magdalena and beside the bell tower, the old minaret. The church has been restored several times, and its last restoration was in 1972.

 

The center of the adjacent yard to the church offers a vision of a rectangular pond, framed by some porticos arranged in its minor sides and a ship built on two floors with open straight shaft on the ground floor. 

 

At both ends of the building appear two stairwells that connect the ground floor with the upper and the rooms built on the two porticos connected by a narrow gallery supported by a column stone attached to the wall of the main building, and equipped with a narrow stairway that started from the courtyard. These three rooms in upstairs formed the classrooms in a Tthe aspect that had at the beginning of the constructions of the church stands out a curious railing around the pond, which must have been built in 1929, designed by Don Innocent Fe Jimenez.