Church of San Martín (Arlucea)

The Church of San Martín de Arlucea, in the municipality of Bernedo (Province of Álava, Spain) is the result of successive extensions and adaptation to new needs. It presents a complex structure in which the different stages of the temple, which run a long time, overlap. The first of them could correspond to the XIII century, of which it conserves considerable elements in late Romanesque style. To these are superimposed others, from successive centuries, until the beginning of the eighteenth century; in Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles, being the Romanesque-Gothic one that corresponds with the greater volume of the work.

Seated on living rock, it consists of a main body, that of the ship, and a series of elements attached by its south and east faces. In its south face the portico and the tower are arranged; and at its eastern end the sacristy is arranged, which is nothing other than the apse of the primitive temple. It presents masonry walls, sillarejo and masonry walls that allow to identify different phases of the work. Description

The temple has a rectangular floor plan, a single nave with three sections and an octagonal apse. It rises, partly, on the rest of structures of the old Romanesque temple. The nave is covered with a succession of three starred vaults with unadorned keys from the second half of the sixteenth century, supported by brackets simply decorated with geometric denticles or rosettes. A last vault, also ribbed covers the altar in the form of half-ochavo. The choir, possibly work of the sixteenth century, with a single escarzano arch supported on pilasters with bases and jambaje of moldings to Gothic taste. It has two portals, both on its southern side: the primitive, covered to the outside but visible from the inside, with its supports and archivolts, and its decoration based on vegetable and animal motifs, now serves as a baptistry; and the current cover, open to the porch, is made with a half-point arch with three sand-bottomed archivolts.

At the east end, behind the present presbytery, is located the sacristy, which is the straight apse of the primitive proto-Gothic temple, which retains structures and decorative elements reused from the Romanesque era. It is covered with two sections of pointed half-barrel vault, with a fajón arch resting on simple brackets. It has two windows that are now blind: one side and the other at the head. The latter is a large window, with broken mullion, with two archivolts slightly pointed on four slender columns, all decorated. The south side, six free columns decorated with vegetable, animal and geometric motifs, and the exterior archivolt (the third) and the sill decorated with nails.

Throughout its south side, a Romanesque portico is added with eight half-point arches made of ashlar stone, four of them covered, and one slightly pointed. Among the arches has external buttresses with canecillos of Romanesque period: masks and monstrous figures. And inside the blinded arches, human faces and vegetal adornments in impositions and supports.

In the southwest corner, the tower is arranged, which corresponds to one of the last stages of construction. It is divided into three bodies. In the superior one the bell tower is located with spans of half point. At present, it is finished by a modern spire.

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