Santa Margalida

Santa Margalida stands in Palma, Spain, as a church and former convent with roots in the thirteenth century. Its early urban Gothic structure remains one of Mallorca’s few surviving examples. A wooden roof spans the nave above five diaphragm arches, combining Mudéjar woodwork with forms inspired by Serlio.

Augustinian nuns first occupied the site after the conquest of Mallorca, following a land exchange with Franciscan builders. By about 1270, the convent had become firmly established near the Porta de la Conquesta. Fourteenth-century enlargement added the apse, while sixteenth-century works reshaped the cloister, chapels and kitchen for the Counter-Reformation. An epidemic later turned the convent into a hospital, before nineteenth-century expropriation brought municipal, storage and military uses.

The former convent now houses the Military History and Culture Museum, while the church serves as a military parish. Its octagonal ribbed apse rests on slender columns beside Gothic and Baroque chapels. The Torrella chapel holds Guillem de Torrella i de Cabanelles’s tomb, returned there in 1971 after several relocations. Nearby plaques recall the old city gate and the water channel that once passed beside the complex.