The heart of Catalonia, where violence brewed

Most of the young men killed during and after the atrocity they committed in Barcelona last week came from Ripoll, a small town towards the Pyrenean border with France. It is best known for its beautiful Romanesque monastery, so people have remarked how unlikely it was that it should be associated with violence. I’m not so sure.

The first church was built on the site in 888, as soon as the tide of Moorish invasion was definitely on the turn. Two more churches were successively constructed there, as Ripoll developed as the religious and cultural focus of Catalonia, before Montserrat took the lead.

This culture was notably different from that of al-andalus that the Muslims of North Africa had conquered, for in Catalonia the demotic language was more like Venetian or Provençal than like the Castilian of the so-called Mozarabic Christians of Toledo.

The church we see today at Ripoll, with its many-storeyed, tall, square tower, was finished before the Norman conquest of England. The wonderful carvings of the west front were added in the next century. Tourists assume that they are looking at a church 1,000 years old. It has, in reality, repeatedly been the object of ruinous violence.

After an earthquake in 1428, for which no one can much be blamed, the church of Santa Maria next suffered a supposed restoration in the late 1820s. The church, as the restorers found it, had two aisles on each side of the nave, running east towards seven parallel apses, three on each side of the high altar.

The nave is unlike any in Spain and resembles more a basilica built under the Roman Emperor Constantine, such as the original St Peter’s in Rome. The restorers actually took down the arcades between the outer aisles, reducing the plan to that of a nave flanked by single aisles.

Next, in 1835, the church was set on fire and left in ruin during the first Carlist war. This was during Spain’s disastrous series of coups and wars that were the gift of liberalism to its political economy.

Only in 1886 did the ruins of the church begin to be reconstructed by an architect called Elies Rogent, who meant well. His patron was the bishop of Vic, where a museum was established for glorious works of art from local churches and monasteries threatened by civil disorder and damp. The museum at Vic is certainly the place to visit for any admirer of the Romanesque.

Only four decades went by before the church was again ransacked and its furniture and fittings burnt, in the Spanish Civil War, a contributory factor towards which was undoubtedly the industrialisation that iron ore and coal brought to the area.

In the decades since, the town has become post-industrial, a bit down at heel, I have found. Muslim immigrants from Morocco came to live here and found work as they could. It’s the sort of place where isolated and alienated young people could become radicalised.

W M Whitehill, the inter-war American historian of the Romanesque, remarked that the “dreariness of the restoration” of Ripoll is made up for by the loveliness of its carved facade (detail above). Surrounding the arched doorway, six friezes of carvings, like strip-cartoons, show Heaven at the top, the doings of King David and Moses in the middle and saints at the bottom.

Enough remains for it to be a thing of beauty, but how wonderful it must have been before it was knocked about. The same might be said of the region in which it lies.