Church of our Lady of the Assumption

The Church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción is one of the Cultural Heritage Sites in the Historic Centre of La Vila Joiosa, also entirely declared BIC (Site of Cultural Interest), and one of only three fortress churches in the province of Alicante.

From the 16th to the 18th century, La Vila Joiosa was the target of important invasions by Turkish and Algerian corsairs, as well as other military confrontations. As a result of a major corsair attack in 1538 (the historical origin of the Moors and Christians festivities) and another one in 1543 that devastated the town, in the middle of the century a Royal Order was signed to rebuild the walls.

We know from an engraving that La Vila Joiosa in the last third of the 16th century was surrounded by a walled belt with three circular bastions, with the lower part inclined for a better resistance to cannon fire.

The walls of La Vila Joiosa are an example of a “pre-barricaded Renaissance urban wall”, a very short-lived ‘style which disappeared when the ‘Vauban’ plan (consisting of massive bastions, often triangular in shape, forming star-shaped fortresses) was widely applied”. For this reason, the walls of La Vila Joiosa are exceptional and marked the end of an ancient medieval defence system. The Church of the Assumption itself, in Catalan Gothic style, is integrated into the walls as a church-fortress, actually the large apse forms the main tower of the walls.

Like the walls, the whole building shows a military structure. The apse forms a huge tower in the Renaissance wall, with very wide walls and very few windows. The most characteristic feature is the round passage around the roof with arrow holes to shoot at attackers, and a cannon-shaped gargoyle to distract the enemy.

In fact, La Vila Joiosa, as the capital of one of the ten “Requerimentos” (districts of anti-Corsair defence) of the kingdom in the 16th century, was one of the best-armed fortresses in Valencia. A visit to this walkway is highly recommended not only to discover the hidden details of a religious building with a military appearance, but also for the views.

Inside, the church, which is Gothic-Levantine style, has a single nave, chapels between buttresses and little decoration. With the exception of the chapel dedicated to the town’s patron saint, Santa Marta, inaugurated in 1740, with many decorative elements and which houses an image of the saint from the 17th century, with her characteristic attributes: a small bucket and a hyssop (holy water sprinkler) with which she dominated a dragon.