A Palace Chapel of the Asturian Kings

The Camara Santa was built by Alfonso II the Chaste in the early ninth century as the reliquary chapel of his palace at Oviedo, then the capital of the small Christian kingdom of Asturias that had survived the Muslim conquest in the mountains of the north. It is a two-storey structure: a lower crypt dedicated to Saint Leocadia holding royal tombs, and an upper chapel of Saint Michael holding the relics. In the twelfth century its walls were lined with a celebrated set of column-statues of the apostles, among the finest Romanesque sculpture in Spain.

Around the chapel the kingdom's craftsmen produced the great goldsmith's works that still sit in it: the Cross of the Angels (808), emblem of the city of Oviedo, and the jewelled Victory Cross (908), emblem of Asturias. The chapel and its treasury were largely destroyed by a dynamite explosion in October 1934 during the Asturian revolution, and several crosses were smashed and their gems scattered; the structure and the metalwork were painstakingly reconstructed. In 1998 the Camara Santa was added to the UNESCO World Heritage listing of the pre-Romanesque monuments of Oviedo and the Kingdom of the Asturias.