Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón

This guide to Iglesia del Sagrado Corazón in Málaga opens in January 1907, when architect Fernando Guerrero Strachan drew a Gothic plan modeled on the cathedrals of Toledo and Burgos, a building that took thirteen years to reach its 1920 consecration. It explains why: unlike those stone giants, Strachan and his partner Manuel Rivera Vera could not afford quarried limestone, so local masons built the whole church from kiln-fired brick instead, laid course by course in an old Andalusian technique borrowed from Islamic builders. The guide follows that unglamorous material into 1931, a year of church burnings across Spain, when fire tore through this building and the parish house beside it.