Inside this cathedral there are two objects that Mallorca has been arguing about for a hundred years, and neither of them was supposed to be permanent.
Start with the ceiling above the high altar. There's an enormous thing suspended up there — a great heptagonal canopy, wrought iron and glass and gilding, a crown of thorns with a crucified Christ hanging inside it, and the Virgin and Saint John at the foot. It hangs on cables. Nothing holds it from below.
Antoni Gaudí made that. And it is a model.
The bishop brought Gaudí over in nineteen oh-four with a specific complaint: the cathedral was gloomy and the congregation couldn't see anything, because a huge stone choir sat in the middle of the nave blocking the view. Gaudí's answer was to take the choir out and move it, open up windows that had been bricked in for centuries, and light the whole interior — dozens of iron lamps, all his design.
Understand what removing that choir meant. It was a walled enclosure of carved stone and tim
ber, centuries old, sitting in the middle of the church like a building inside a building, and it was where the clergy sat. Taking it out means telling a cathedral chapter that the furniture their predecessors installed is in the way, and then physically dismantling it and putting it somewhere else. He also unblocked windows that generations had deliberately filled in. This was not restoration. It
