Cathedral of the Good Shepherd

You only need to look up in the centre of San Sebastián to spot it: the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, Artzain Onaren katedrala in Basque, is the city's most recognisable religious building and an unmissable landmark for anyone exploring it. The first thing that strikes you is its pronounced verticality, that upward thrust that makes its silhouette one of the most distinctive outlines of Gipuzkoa's capital.

It isn't just a matter of presence. The Good Shepherd is also the largest church in all of Gipuzkoa, so a visit lets you appreciate both the sheer scale of the building and the care that went into its design. It's well worth walking slowly around it before going in, to see how its mass and soaring lines shape the urban space around it.

It was built in the closing years of the 19th century, at the height of historicism, when architects and patrons looked to the medieval past for inspiration. The result is a neo-Gothic building that reinterprets the language of the great Gothic cathedrals through the sensibility of its own time. This desire to evoke the Gothic is precisely what explains the emphasis on height and the sense of elevation, features that visitors notice straight away.

Interestingly, the church wasn't originally a cathedral. It gained that status in 1953, when it became the seat of the Diocese of San Sebastián, part of the Archdiocese of Pamplona. Since then it has been the diocese's principal church, and its institutional role adds to its architectural value and the weight it carries in the city's image. An essential stop for understanding the San Sebastián that took shape in the late 19th century.