Pamplona Cathedral ( Saint Maria)

A beautiful gothic cathedral, this building is made up from many earler structures, the earliest from the 9 th century.

Its importance lays in the fact that the Mediaeval kings of Navarre were crowned here and some of them were also buried in crypts below the Cathedral.

Although not huge - its grandeur lays in the half dozen richly decorated chapels - all donated by leading families through the ages. These chapels are dripping in gold plate and simply spectacular.

This is the highly carved stone staircase to the dome.

This is in the chapel of Navaras (?) and contains - so it says- the chains which shackled one of the kings who was freed in 1212 after the Christains defeated the Muslim invaders.

This is one of the hallways of the cloister.