Our heritage
of our past and a part of our present.
The stones here speak, because they are a part
of our past and a part of our present.
Senija
Arc gòtic
We find ourselves at the rear of the church, where the apse is that houses the altar, facing northeast. This is an interesting case since the church is offset from the rest of the plots. Purpose-built churches constructed from scratch always tried to follow the correct east-west axis, so the fact that this one is offset seems to correlate with the popular theory that, before the existence of the church in question, there was a mosque on this site. As such, the prayer wall (or quibla) would be on the right-hand side, correctly oriented to the southeast towards Mecca.
Although it is true that most of this church nowadays is a result of the renovations of the 17th century, there also used to be a 14th century hermitage in which the main image was a carving of La Mare de Déu de La Misericòrdia, which disappeared during the Spanish Civil War.
Senija was elevated to a Moorish vicarage dependent on Benissa in 1535, until finally being separated and constituted as its own parish in 1569. The pointed arch of clear Gothic style probably dates from this period. It is made with thick tiles, a technique widely used in public buildings in more rural areas to reduce costs as opposed to the pointed arches of carved stone that one can see in other large buildings of that time, such as La Llotja de La Seda in Valencia.
Inside the arch there is a reproduction of an 18th century Valencian ceramic panel depicting La Mare de Déu dels Desemparats, which is conserved inside the church. This ceramic panel consists of twelve tiles measuring about 21 centimetres by 21 centimetres, which is the so-called “pam valencià”, a fundamental characteristic of 18th century Valencian taulelleria (tile work).
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Senija
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