Iglesia de Ntra. Sra. de los Remedios

About this place

There is one photograph of Estepona's old town that repeats across postcards, brochures and guidebooks: two towers rising above the white rooftops. That image is where the idea of the "twin towers" of the Church of Los Remedios comes from. The church does not have twin towers. It has one.

The church's tower is the taller, slimmer one: four bodies stepping inwards, the bell stage already octagonal, crowned by pinnacles of glazed ceramic in two colours. The other one — lower, pink and white, with its little cupola and its clock face — stands some hundred and twenty metres to the south and belongs to a different building altogether. It is the Clock Tower, all that stayed standing of the earlier Los Remedios church when the 1755 earthquake ruined the rest. Two towers, two periods, two buildings. The confusion makes sense in the photograph; it does not survive a walk down the street.

What is documented about the church you can visit today begins in the late eighteenth century. It was raised over the old Veracruz chapel as the church of the Franciscan convent, paid for and largely built by the townspeople themselves. The stone doorway carries the carved date 1772 and rewards a long look: a round arch with the anagram of Mary on the keystone, a window crowned by a trilobed scallop shell, a set of three oculi, and an unusual iconographic mix in which Marian and Franciscan motifs sit alongside others brought back from the Americas. Fray Diego José de Cádiz, one of the most celebrated preachers in the Spain of his day, took part in its inauguration.

In 1835 the disentailment law expelled the friars, and soon afterwards the building became the parish church of Los Remedios, which is what it remains. In 1936 its archive and its artworks were burned: the altarpiece you see today dates from 1993, installed during a deep refurbishment. Which is why the building reads best from the outside in — the eighteenth-century stone is in the façade; the interior is, in large part, reconstructed memory.

Inside is the image of Estepona's Patron Saint, whose August celebration is one of the most important dates in the local calendar. It is open at mass times, with no ticket.

Of what stood here before, no stone and no official document survives: the local chronicle of Manuel Sánchez Bracho records that around 1400 this plot was a pine wood. The council's heritage sources do not confirm it, and we tell it as what it is: the town's written memory, not a verified fact.