Horseshoe Arch to Estipite: Ten Iberian Styles and Their Overseas Descendants

The Visigoths entered Hispania in 415 and remained the dominant people until the Umayyad conquest of 711. Their buildings were small but well made, with stone vaulting and horseshoe arches, and San Juan Bautista at Banos de Cerrato, built in 661, shows the basilican plan the style favoured. Start here because the horseshoe arch is already present before Islam arrives.

The style of Al-Andalus and the Maghreb, developed from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. Its page singles out the Great Mosque of Cordoba, begun in 785 under Abd al-Rahman I, and the Alhambra at Granada, built mainly under the Nasrids before the fall of Granada in 1492, as the early and late peaks of the style.

Here the Islamic vocabulary of horseshoe and multi-lobed arches, brick, tile and carved stucco is applied to Christian buildings, mostly between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The page reads the style as physical evidence of Muslim and Christian coexistence, which ended when Spain's Muslims and Jews were forced to convert or leave.

Portugal's style of about 1490 to 1520, under King Manuel I, joins late Gothic structure to carved ropes, anchors and armillary spheres drawn from the voyages of discovery. Belem Tower and the Jeronimos Monastery are its best known works, and its page lists Mudejar and Spanish Plateresque among its sources.

Spain's transitional style of the late fifteenth century keeps Gothic planning but covers doors and windows in dense ornament mixed with Renaissance rustication and classical capitals. It peaked under Charles V in Salamanca, Leon and Santiago de Compostela, and its name comes from plata, silver, for the silversmith's fineness of detail.

The reaction against Plateresque ornament. Under Philip II, Juan de Herrera took over the design of El Escorial, begun in 1563 and completed in 1584, and reduced it to plain cubic volumes. Francisco de Mora, his student, designed the Ducal Palace of Lerma, and the style stayed the Habsburg court language into the seventeenth century.

The Spanish Baroque answer to that austerity. Named for the Churriguera family, it frames doors and facades with estipites, inverted obelisk pilasters, and with dense carved ornament. The page points to the Metropolitan Tabernacle beside Mexico City Cathedral, designed by Lorenzo Rodriguez and finished in 1760, as a colonial masterpiece.

Spanish building as it was carried overseas. The sixteenth-century Laws of the Indies set rules for laying out new towns in the Americas, and in the Philippines, from 1571 to 1898, the Paoay Church in Ilocos Sur shows massive buttressed walls built for earthquakes.

The Portuguese counterpart is not one style but the many regional traditions built across an empire that reached South America, Africa, India, Oceania and East Asia. Brazil, Macau and India each still promote their surviving Portuguese-built architecture as a major attraction.

The last stop looks back. Between about 1890 and 1915, California and the Southwest revived the Spanish missions with thick stuccoed walls, clay tile roofs, arcades and courtyards. The Mission Inn in Riverside and Santa Barbara's 1902 rail station are among its examples, built from nostalgia for a colonial past.