Santa Maria del Naranco

The church of St Mary at Mount Naranco is a Roman Catholic Asturian pre-Romanesque Asturian architecture church on the slope of Mount Naranco situated 3 kilometres 1.9 mi from Oviedo, northern Spain. Ramiro I of Asturias ordered it to be constructed as a royal palace as part of a larger complicated that also incorporated the close by church of San Miguel de Lillo, a hundred meters away. It was completed in 842 and consecrated in 848. Its structural features, consisting of the barrel vault — with transverse ribs corresponding one-to-one with contraforts at the outside, make it a clean precursor of the Romanesque construction.

The outdoors decorations, as well as the use of stilted arches mark the supposed verticality of the composition. Built as a leisure palace, it's far situated on the southern facet of Mount Naranco going through the town, and became at the beginning part of a chain of royal buildings located within the outskirts. Its person as a civil building modified inside the 12th century while it was transformed right into a church committed to St. Mary. The Palace of Santa Maria del Naranco, worried a good sized stylistic, morphological, constructive and decorative maintenance of Pre-Romanesque, supplementing it with new, progressive resources, representing a soar forward with respect to right away previous periods.