Catedral del Buen Pastor

The architect Manuel Echave looked at Cologne Cathedral in Germany and essentially said I am going to build that in the Basque Country. The result is the Catedral del Buen Pastor -- the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd -- and while it does not quite reach Cologne's scale, the ambition is unmistakable. Neo-Gothic arches, flying buttresses, pointed spires, the whole package. Queen Maria Cristina laid the first stone on September twenty-ninth, eighteen eighty-eight.

The seventy-five metre bell tower was completed in eighteen ninety-nine by architect Ramon Cortazar. It dominates the city skyline and is visible from practically everywhere in the centre. But the real showstopper is inside: the organ.

This instrument is the largest in Spain and one of the largest in Europe. It has eight thousand one hundred and seventy-four pipes. Let me break that down for you: six thousand seven hundred and sixty-nine are tin, one thousand and fifty are zinc, and three hundred and fifty-five are wood. The whole thing weighs thirty tonnes. It has five keyboards and one hundred and five registers. The longest pipe stretches twelve and a half metres. The shortest is one centimetre. The range between those two extremes produces a sound that fills every corner of this massive building.

Here is an interesting quirk: despite all its cathedral-scale grandeur, this building only officially became a cathedral in nineteen fifty-three. Before that, it was just a very large parish church. The capacity is four thousand people, which gives you a sense of the interior volume. Stand inside when the organ is playing and you will understand why they say Basque churches were built for sound as much as worship.