Valencia Cathedral

The Santo Caliz is a composite object about 17 centimetres tall. Its heart is a small, plain cup of dark reddish agate, polished to near-translucency, which archaeologists date to a Greco-Roman or eastern Mediterranean workshop of roughly the first century BC to the first century AD, a plausible date and place for a vessel used at a Jewish supper in Jerusalem. Below it, medieval goldsmiths added a stem and a foot made from a second, inverted agate cup, joined by a golden knop set with pearls and gemstones. Devotion holds that only the upper bowl could be the cup of the Last Supper; the mount is the work of later centuries that gave the relic a fitting form.

Among the many objects claimed as the Holy Grail, the Valencia cup is the one that scholars treat most seriously, because the bowl is genuinely ancient and its documented Spanish history is long, even if the chain back to the first century rests on tradition rather than record. The cathedral is careful to present it as a venerated relic with a strong claim rather than a proven one.

Valencian tradition traces the cup from the upper room in Jerusalem to Rome, carried by Saint Peter and used by the early popes, until the deacon Saint Lawrence, facing the persecution of the emperor Valerian in 258, sent it for safety to his home region around Huesca in the Aragonese Pyrenees. There it is said to have passed among monasteries and cave sanctuaries during the centuries of Muslim rule, notably the monastery of San Juan de la Pena, before the crown of Aragon took possession of it.

King Alfonso the Magnanimous handed it to Valencia Cathedral in 1437 in settlement of a debt, and it has remained there since, apart from removals for safety during the Napoleonic wars and the Spanish Civil War. The documentary trail becomes firm only in the medieval Aragonese record; the earlier journey is a matter of pious tradition. Whatever its ultimate history, the cup made Valencia a Grail city, and in the twenty-first century a waymarked pilgrimage, the Camino del Santo Grial, was created to link the sites associated with its passage through Aragon and Valencia.

The cathedral was begun in 1262 over the site of Valencia's chief mosque, itself built on the ground of an earlier Roman temple, and its long building history left it a Gothic core with a distinctive octagonal bell tower, the Micalet, and later Baroque and neoclassical work. The cup is displayed in the Chapel of the Holy Chalice, originally the cathedral's Gothic chapter house, a rib-vaulted hall completed in 1369 and set aside for the relic in the fifteenth century.

The chapel has drawn popes: John Paul II celebrated Mass there with the cup in 1982 and Benedict XVI in 2006, and the Holy See has granted Valencia perpetual "Holy Chalice" jubilee years. Recognised as the seat of the Archbishop of Valencia since the reconquest of 1238, the cathedral remains an active centre of worship as well as the home of the best-known Grail claimant, and its Grail cult has become a distinctive part of the city's religious identity and tourism.