SANTIAGO DI COMPOSTELA, ARCHDIOCESE OF. — Silver reliquary urn of St. James the Apostle (16th century), with the lamps offered by the condottiere Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba (16th century) — Santiago, Cathedral.
It has an area of 37,000 sq. km. with a population of 1,500,000 inhabitants, of whom 1,475,000 are Catholics, distributed in 30 parishes served by 37 diocesan priests and 51 regulars; it has a seminary, 13 male religious communities and 23 female ones (Ann. Pont. 1952, p. 366). The diocese was created by Pope Adrian VI on 28 April 1522 and was elevated to metropolitan status by Pope Pius VII on 24 November 1803. Its suffragan dioceses are Camagüey and Cienfuegos.
The island was discovered by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage, on 27 October 1492. Occupied by the governor Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar in 1508, it was organized politically and religiously three years later; the first bishop was the Franciscan Juan de Ubiña, succeeded in 1537 by M. Rodríguez de Salamanca. It was the only diocese until 1787, when the westernmost part of the island, namely Havana, was separated from II. The Cathedral, one of the oldest temples on the island, does not offer the proportions and beauties that would correspond to its importance; the style is the usual one of Spanish colonial architecture with its two square towers.
It has had a series of illustrious bishops, among whom, from 1831, the Franciscan C. Alameda y Brea, later a cardinal, and his successor in 1850, St. Anthony Mary Claret, founder of the Claretians, recently canonized.