There was not a passer-by who did not stay this Wednesday looking at the six bronze bells placed on the ground waiting to be raised to the tower of the church of Santa Catalina, 56 meters high. They shone, recently cast or restored. Some approached to try to touch them, attracted by their shapes and texture. When a huge crane raised them throughout the day, the concentration of people increased to observe the long operation at the foot of the Gothic temple, whose baroque bell tower is aligned with the modernist Calle de la Paz, in the heart of Valencia. In May, the church bells that stopped ringing more than a century ago will ring again.
The main voice will be the Santa Catalina bell, which receives the colloquial name of
La Gerra,
a word in Valencian that means jar or jug and refers to its inverted shape. It is also a way to pay tribute to the original 18th century bell that was manufactured, along with other smaller ones, in London, and literally melted until its disappearance at the beginning of the 20th century. The rest were transferred to other temples.
Given their origin, those bells that were cheaper to acquire in England than in Spain, thanks to the contacts of a Valencian parishioner, were also called “the Lutheran ones.” The new main bell preserves the English style, with the Valencian-style wooden yoke and forged clapper and has a total weight of three tons (1,810 kilos, without the counterweight) and a diameter of 146.5 cm. It features hardware for manual turning and has an electrified touch hammer.
“We already have bells, as God commands,” jokes the rector of the church, José Benito Gallego. “We are already approaching the original set and now we have to maintain the momentum. We must not forget the long tradition in the Valencian Community of bells, which are deeply rooted in the town. Not in vain, the manual ringing of bells was declared an Intangible Asset of Humanity,” adds the priest, in reference to the UNESCO declaration of 2022, whose initiative came from the association of bell ringers of Albaida, a town in the interior of Valencia, although the distinction covered all of Spain.
The current recovery of the Santa Catalina bells began four years ago, when the bell ringers contacted the Generalitat Heritage, says Vicent Mesa, president of the Mestres Campaners association. He remembers that day in 1729 when the English ship arrived at the Grao with the six original bells and the difficulties at that time in transporting them and placing them by hand and with pulleys in the tower. The casting of the new bell and the restoration of the other five have been carried out in the workshops of Gabriel Rivera de Montehermoso, in Cáceres. The Valencian Generalitat has contributed 122,000 euros for the operation, according to the current Valencian vice president and Minister of Culture, Vicente Barrera.
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The new bells of Santa Catalina will cover the gap in a bell tower that was crowned for decades by a clock, once the original set was removed. When the temple was restored 20 years ago, the clock was removed and there were people who protested, accustomed to checking the time and the image of the non-original bell tower. Now the church has bells again in a process of recovery of a temple that was intended to be demolished after the damage caused in the Civil War. However, it was found that the early Gothic was well preserved beneath the superimposed reforms (first Renaissance; then Baroque, above all) undertaken over time, as is often the case in many ancient churches.
Santa Catalina was built in the 13th century in the Valencian cathedral neighborhood on a previous mosque. It is said that it was named after the Infanta Catalina, a daughter of King Jaume I, who entered Valencia in triumph on October 9, 1238, after his conquest. “It is the only church in Valencia that, together with the cathedral, has three naves and an ambulatory or ambulatory. We were missing the bells,” indicates the rector of the temple. Its sounds can be heard for the first time on May 12, on the occasion of the celebration of the festival of the Virgen de los Desamparados, for which manual touch will be used.
The project to recover the English bells from the Santa Catalina tower has been promoted by the Brotherhood of Diocesan Operative Priests, which has served the temple since 1950, the Archbishopric of Valencia and the 'Mestres Campaners' Cultural Association. “This action will be followed by a second phase, with the restoration of the remaining bells of this emblematic Valencian tower, whose feasibility study will begin shortly,” notes the Ministry of Culture.
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