Church of St Mary Magdalene and chapel of Nuestra Señora de Montserrat

In the sacramental chapel of Seville's Magdalena church hang two canvases that Francisco de Zurbarán, then in his late 20s, painted in 1626 for the Dominican friars who owned this building. That year he signed a contract with the prior of the convent of San Pablo for a large series of paintings, one of his first big commissions. One shows Saint Dominic in Soriano, the story of a portrait of the saint said to have been brought to a friar in Calabria by the Virgin herself. The other shows Blessed Reginald of Orléans, a gravely ill cleric, healed by the Virgin before he joined the Dominican order.

San Pablo was one of Seville's great medieval convents, and Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican defender of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, was consecrated bishop of Chiapas here in 1544. After flood damage in the early 1690s, the church was rebuilt between 1694 and 1709 by Leonardo de Figueroa, the architect behind much of Baroque Seville, and the painter Lucas Valdés soon covered its vaults with frescoes of Dominican subjects.

The church only became the Magdalena in the 19th century. During the French occupation the old parish church of Saint Mary Magdalene was pulled down in 1811, and after the convent was suppressed the parish settled here for good. The small chapel of Our Lady of Montserrat, named in the full title, stands apart on Calle Cristo del Calvario, on what was once the convent's forecourt.