The cathedral of Santa Chiara can be found in the city’s old town centre; it overlooks a large square, also home to the bishop’s residence and town hall. The building has been home to the cathedral since 1503, the year in which the diocese transferred from Tratalias to Iglesias.
The church is named after the saint who founded the order of the Poor Clares with links to Saint Francis of Assisi; it was built on the wishes of Ugolino della Gherardesca who, in 1284, had it erected following Romanesque and Gothic styles. Two inscriptions mark when the work started and finished, in 1288. However, in the XVI century, work was done on the building introducing a Gothic Catalan style.
The cathedral follows a Latin cross layout with a single nave overlooked by two large chapels either side; it is rounded off with a transept and quadrangular apse. The nave, split into three aisles, and the apse have a rib-cross vaulted ceiling; there is an eighteenth-century wooden altar dedicated to sant’Antioco and a marble polychrome altar in the transept.
To the left, the square-planned bell tower leans against the gabled facade with two orders. The Romanesque portal with rounded arches and architrave opens up on the lower order of the facade; while the upper order features a series of three-foil arches running under the coping and enclose the large, moulded oculus flanked by ogival arches.
