Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción y Campanario

The Church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción is the parish church of Guadalest, standing at the centre of the medieval citadel next to the Plaça de Sant Gregori viewpoint. The current Baroque building was constructed between 1740 and 1753 over the remains of an earlier chapel raised after the Reconquest, in the 13th century. During the Spanish Civil War it was burned and looted, and in 1962 it was restored with a shorter floor plan than the original: the rebuild removed the transept and dome the Baroque church once had. The façade, plain and built of rubble masonry, contrasts with the ornate decoration typical of other Baroque churches from the same period, a restraint that reflects both the village's modest size and the repeated rebuilding the structure has gone through.

A tower that lives apart

What sets this parish church apart is that it has no bell tower of its own. Its bells hang instead in a separate tower built on an outcrop some distance away, one of the most recognisable silhouettes on the Costa Blanca. The layout follows the site's topography: the original church stood inside the castle's walls, in a spot too enclosed and too low, and the bells needed a higher, more open point so their sound would carry clearly into the valley.

Inside, the single nave holds a modern altarpiece dating from after the 20th-century rebuild and a font that predates it. The church remains an active parish and is a standard stop on any walk through the citadel, between the Castillo de San José and the walled town's museums. As a working church, visiting quietly is worth keeping in mind if a service happens to be underway, the same courtesy expected in any active place of worship. The short walk between the church and the tower is one of the most-photographed sequences in the citadel, since both structures appear together in the same frame from several points along the way.