The cathedral of Faro stands inside the Vila Adentro, the walled enclosure that forms the oldest part of the city, on a site occupied successively by a Roman forum, a mosque and finally a Christian church after the conquest of the Algarve in the thirteenth century. This first part examines that stratification and the building's exterior: the low, fortified silhouette, the massive tower that survives from the earliest Gothic campaign and now serves as a belfry and viewpoint over the lagoon of the Ria Formosa, and the traces of the damage inflicted by the English raid at the end of the sixteenth century and by the earthquake of 1755. Each disaster prompted repairs and additions, so the fabric is a sequence rather than a single design. Filmed within the orange-tree square that surrounds it, the cathedral appears as what it is: a building shaped less by one architect than by the successive fortunes of a frontier city on the southern edge of Europe.
