The Cathedral-Basilica Metropolitan Church of the Assumption of Our Lady of Valencia, is the seat of the Archbishopric of Valencia and is dedicated by the wish of Jaime I to the Assumption of Mary.

It was consecrated in 1238 by the first bishop of Valencia after the Reconquest, Fray Andrés de Albalat.

Valencian Gothic is the predominant construction style of this cathedral, although it also contains elements of Romanesque, French Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical.

Inside, the Holy Chalice is venerated, dating from the 1st century, and given to the cathedral by King Alfonso the Magnanimous in 1436.

It contains some of the first and best paintings of the Quattrocento from all over the Iberian Peninsula, which arrived from Rome through artists hired by Alexander VI. This last Valencian Pope, when he was still Cardinal Rodrigo de Borja, made the request to raise the Valentina see to the rank of Metropolitan, a category that was granted to him by Pope Innocent VIII in 1492.

The site of the cathedral has been a place of worship since Roman times, since there was a temple dedicated to Jupiter or Diana, of which the columns can still be seen standing today, in the Almoina Museum, next to the Cathedral.

On this temple the Valencian cathedral was erected, during the Visigothic period. With the Arab conquest, the place became the seat of the Balansiya mosque (Valencia in Arabic); until in the 13th century, it became a Christian church again, after the conquest of the city by Jaime I.

It was used to lift material from the neighboring quarries of Burjasot and Godella, but also from other more remote places such as Benidorm and Jávea, from where the stones arrived by boat.

Other reasons that explain the simplicity and sobriety of the Cathedral of Valencia are that it was built quickly to mark the Christian territory against the Muslim, and that it was not a sumptuary work of any monarch, but an eminently citizen construction financed by the local bourgeoisie.