Church of Santa Catalina
Baroque hexagonal bell tower on a Gothic parish church, rebuilt after a sixteenth-century fire.
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About this audio guide
This guide to the Church of Santa Catalina in Valencia tells how the city's bells came, of all places, from a Protestant workshop in London: after judging two salvaged medieval bells too plain for a new hexagonal baroque tower finished in the 1720s, the parish commissioned six bells from founder Richard Phelps. It follows their journey across the sea and through the streets on a mule-drawn wagon decked in silk and myrtle, and the nickname Valencians gave them that stuck for two centuries, los luteranos. Stand beneath the tower and picture the crowds who lined these streets to watch the wagon pass, while rival parishes looked on with envy.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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