Catedral de Morelia

The Cathedral of the Transfiguration, seat of the Archdiocese of Morelia, is the building that defines the city's skyline: its two pink-stone towers, 66.8 m high, can be seen from across the valley. The first cathedral here, consecrated around 1580 after the bishopric moved from Pátzcuaro, was a modest building that was later badly damaged by fire. Bishop Marcos Ramírez del Prado laid the first stone of the present church on 6 August 1660, the feast of the Transfiguration, to a design by the Italian architect Vicenzo Barroccio, who died before it was finished. The church was consecrated in 1705, and the towers and façades were completed by José de Medina; dates carved in the stone read 1742 on the west tower and 1744 on the main façade.

The style is the local 'tablero' baroque, in which flat pilasters and carved panels take the place of round columns; the façade has more than two hundred pilasters. Unusually, the main front faces north onto Avenida Madero, the city's main street, rather than onto a plaza, and the church sits between the Plaza de Armas and the Plaza Melchor Ocampo. It is a Latin-cross plan about 96 m long, with a dome covered in blue-and-white tiles on an octagonal drum and a 19th-century wrought-iron railing around the atrium, put up after the church was looted during the War of Independence. Agustín de Iturbide, later Mexico's first emperor, was baptised in its silver font and married Ana María Huarte here in 1805, and Pope Francis visited in February 2016.

Inside are three naves with neoclassical altarpieces, an 18th-century silver monstrance, paintings by Miguel Cabrera and Juan Rodríguez Juárez in the sacristy and chapter house, and the Señor de la Sacristía, a 16th-century Christ made of corn-stalk paste whose gold crown is said to have been a gift from Philip II. The German-built organ, San Gregorio Magno, has about 4,600 pipes and hosts an international organ festival. Every Saturday at 9 pm Avenida Madero closes to traffic for the encendido, when the façade is lit in changing colours to music and fireworks; it is free and can draw thousands of people. In October and November 2026 the theme is film music, followed at 9:30 pm by a video-mapping show on the nearby Plaza Valladolid.