Tarragona Cathedral

Tarragona Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

One ticket covers the cathedral, the cloister and the diocesan museum, which occupies rooms around the cloister and holds Roman and medieval material found on the site. It is inexpensive and includes an audio guide in most versions. Evening concerts with a glass of cava are staged in the nave in summer and sold separately; they are aimed at visitors but the setting carries them. Guided tours of Roman Tarragona include the cathedral and cost several times the entry;

the city's Roman circuit, with the amphitheatre and the walls, is a separate combined ticket. Tarragona is an hour from Barcelona by train and the cathedral sits at the top of the old town, a steep ten-minute walk from the station. Queues are rare. The cathedral is a working parish and closes to visitors during services. The ticket office is inside the cloister gate on the north side, not at the main west door, which is only used for services.

Visiting Tarragona Cathedral: what to see

The cathedral was begun around 1170 on the site of a Roman temple of Augustus, whose foundations have been traced beneath the nave, and on the mosque that replaced it. Building ran into the fourteenth century, which is why the west front is a Gothic doorway set into a Romanesque wall under an unfinished rose window, with the whole thing left incomplete when money ran out. The interior is transitional, heavy Romanesque piers carrying pointed vaults, and it is one of the largest churches in Catalonia.

The alabaster retable of St Tecla, carved by Pere Joan in the 1420s, is the finest late Gothic altarpiece in the region. The cloister is the reason many visitors come: square, arcaded, with capitals carved with beasts and, in one famous corner, a funeral procession of rats carrying a cat that turns out to be feigning death. A Moorish prayer niche is built into one wall. Fragments of the Roman temple precinct are displayed in the museum rooms, including inscribed blocks reused as building stone in the twelfth century.

Tarragona Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

Open Monday to Saturday from mid-morning to early evening in summer, with shorter hours in winter and closure on Sunday mornings for mass. The cloister is open to the weather and pleasant in spring and autumn; in July and August the old town is hot and the cathedral is one of the cool places in it. Tarragona's Santa Tecla festival in the third week of September fills the square in front with human towers and processions.

The cathedral steps are the meeting place of the town at any hour. Dress modestly. Photography without flash is allowed. Allow an hour for cathedral, cloister and museum. The Roman amphitheatre above the sea is ten minutes downhill and the walk along the medieval walls starts beside the cathedral quarter. The cathedral is at the top of a long stepped street lined with cafes, which makes the climb up more pleasant than it sounds.