ORIENTATION OF THE CHURCHES IN THE HISPANIC MEDIEVAL CASTLES

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that the pre-Romanesque and Romanesque churches are usually oriented to positions compatible with the sunrise on some day of the year. This supposes an annual variability that allows a precise calculation of the stakeout day, making possible to analyse the reasons for choosing that specific day. How-ever, in the churches of medieval fortifications there are functional conditions that can alter this general crite-rion. In this case there are strong defensive conditions that can prevail over the symbolic conditions of the sunrise orientation. This is not the general rule and there are numerous examples of churches forced by orien-tation to very unfavourable positions in the territory. Therefore, this study may be of interest and provide a new point of view when concerning to churches with functional conditions very different from the normal ones. Due to the scarcity of specific studies on the orientation of the churches of fortified ensembles, the au-thors propose to analyse the orientations measured in a group of 43 Spanish and Portuguese churches linked to medieval fortifications built between the 9th and 13th centuries. Only churches that may be directly related to fortification have been selected, excluding doubtful cases. It is not included the numerous castles in which it is not possible to identify the church or chapel. Finally, some interesting atypical cases will be analysed, which are very notable in this type of churches.