The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is a Catholic church. It was designed as a temple and fortress, its apse being one of the cubes of the city wall.

It is surrounded by several manor houses or palaces, the most important of which are those of the Velada, Rey Niño and Valderrábanos families, which were assigned to defend the Gate of the Loyalists or the Peso de la Harina.

It is not known precisely when the construction of the cathedral began. There are two theories, one of which states that Alvar García began to build it in 1091 on the remains of the Mozarabic church of San Salvador, ruined by successive Muslim attacks, and that Alfonso VI of León raised the money needed to build it.

However, most historians believe that the master builder Giral Fruchel was responsible for the cathedral and date it to the 12th century, coinciding with the timeline of the Castilian repopulation carried out by Raymond of Burgundy. It is thought that Fruchel built the oldest part of the cathedral, the chevet, while the nave and aisles, the adjacent chapels and the top of the towers are the result of successive works between the 13th and 16th centuries.

It is the first Gothic cathedral in Spain, in the style of the French cathedrals of the Île-de-France (Saint-Denis, which it closely resembles, and Vézelay), the area built by Fruchel being in the Romanesque style in transition to Gothic. Subsequently, different masters continued and modified the building plan in the full Gothic style.

In the cathedral lie the mortal remains of the historian and penultimate president of the government of the 2nd Republic in exile, Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, and of the president of the Spanish government from 1977 to 1981, Adolfo Suárez and his wife, Amparo Illana.