EL MIGUELETE
THE CATHEDRAL TOWER OF VALENCIA ‘EL MIGUELETE’ “It houses the oldest and largest musical instrument in the Comunidad Valenciana. Juana la Loca, the Borgias and Blasco Ibáñez have climbed its steps. The inventor Juan de la Cierva flew his Autogiro (a sort of prototype helicopter) off its terrace in 1924. Zeppelins flew over it and later bomber aircraft threw their dark shadow over it in the 1930s. The Great Bordini rode down it on a motorbike in the 1970s!” Forget the City of Arts and Sciences, the Torre de Francia, and the Modernist temples of the Estación del Norte and the Central Market. Don’t even think about the Parotet and the Palau de Música. The Torres de Serranos runs it close but if any one building has become a symbol of Valencia it’s the cathedral bell tower, known to us all as ‘El Miguelete’. It has stood watching over the city for nearly 600 Article © 2020 24/7 Valencia
years, its bells ringing out warnings of pirates, French invasions and air raids. It has overseen the fall and rise of new republics and civil wars and has taken on a popular identity all of its own, separate from the cathedral itself. Construction started in 1381, and the tower was completed in 1429. It was built in a style dictated by the Templar Knights, who had a thing for mathematical symmetry. So, it is perfectly octagonal in shape and its perimeter is exactly the same as its height from the base to its original terrace (51 metres). Various bits and bobs were added and taken away over the centuries and it now stands at 71 metres… to the tip of the cross at the top of the belfry. The Templars also left their mark on other weird and wonderful features of the tower. The dark prison, in the tower’s second section, is a stone
room with five-metre thick walls. This is where those who entered the cathedral asking for “sanctuary” from the forces of law and order were kept. An unusually designed window, which is not in line with the rest of the tower, only allows sunlight into the room for just two minutes on exactly the morning of 15 August, the Catholic feast of the Assumption to which the cathedral was originally dedicated. Another strange feature is the Piedra Sillar or foundation stone, which is at the base of the tower in C/ del Miguelete and juts out a little from the others. If you give it a sharp knock, you can hear the sound clearly up in the bell room. To this day nobody knows exactly how it works; some sort of cavity must have been incorporated into the building but there is nothing in the original plans. It was used to let the
