Santuario Guadalupano de Zamora

The Santuario Diocesano de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, a few blocks from Zamora's Plaza de Armas on 5 de Mayo street, is the tallest church building in Mexico: with their spires its two towers reach 107.5 m. It was begun as the new cathedral of the diocese of Zamora. Bishop José María Cázares y Martínez laid the cornerstone on 2 February 1898, Candlemas, to a design attributed to the Zamora builder Jesús Hernández Segura, and a rail line was run to the site to bring stone from the Cerro del Jaripo. More than 300 men worked on it, and by 1910 four of its five naves were roofed.

Then history intervened. Work stopped in 1914 with the Revolution, and the Cristero War kept it stopped. In 1940 a presidential decree of Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated the half-built church, and for decades it was used as an army barracks, a tenement for hundreds of poor families, a school and finally a parking lot for the city's rubbish trucks; one wall still shows bullet holes from executions carried out against it. Zamorans called it 'la inconclusa', the unfinished one. In 1988 it was returned to the Church; work restarted in 1990 with a new facade recalling Milan cathedral, and the church was dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe and inaugurated on 12 December 2008.

The building is 95 m long and 57 m wide, with five naves and a transept held up by 36 pillars, and 112 niches for statues of saints. The vaults of the side aisles, from the first stage, are of brick brought from France, and the floor is red and green granite from India. Modernist stained glass by the Carmelite artist Gerardo López Bonilla, depicting the mysteries of the Rosary, covers more than 1,400 square metres, and the facade has a rose window 6.5 m across. Over the main door is a 65-tonne organ with 3,500 pipes, built in Germany by Alexander Schuke Potsdam Orgelbau and inaugurated in 2008. Two crypt chapels at the entrance hold 2,800 niches.