Built on the site of the old Aljama Mosque, initially as a parish church, it later became a collegiate church (1413) and finally a cathedral in 1510 and definitively from 1564. Its construction began at the end of the thirteenth century, it must be ascribed to the Catalan or Levantine Gothic style, with a floor plan of three naves, ambulatory and chapels between buttresses. The central nave is slightly higher than the side naves and the flying buttresses are poorly developed. The roof is on a flat terrace with three poles and on the outside smooth surfaces predominate with few openings that give the whole a compact appearance. Broadly speaking, four major constructive and stylistic phases can be distinguished in the temple, the first three in the Gothic style and the last in the Renaissance: tower and naves at the foot of the church (late thirteenth-mid-fourteenth century), chancel with a high altar, ambulatory and old chapter hall (mid-fifteenth-early sixteenth). transept (1505) and the Annunciation façade and chapels next to the tower (second half of the sixteenth century). The Tower is probably the oldest part of the cathedral, it was built between the end of the thirteenth century and the middle of the fourteenth century. It consists of four bodies covered by simple ribbed vaults and separated externally by continuous mouldings. It housed different functions on its different floors: body of bells, body of the clock, wax room and episcopal prison, a fact attested to in some curious inscriptions made by the prisoners.
The church has three main portals, the Puerta de las Cadenas with a polylobed arch and impost capitals, it lacks a tympanum and mullion, it dates from the fourteenth century; the Puerta del Loreto dates from the fifteenth century, it is in archaic Gothic style, it has archivolts decorated with angels playing musical instruments, in 1580 the mullion was removed and the tympanum was decorated with geometric motifs; finally the Annunciation Portal , like some of the northern chapels, is in the Renaissance style, completed by Juan Inglés in 1588, it has a triumphal arch scheme.
The transept is due to a reform carried out in 1505 according to designs by Pere Compte, the author of the Lonja de Valencia. By eliminating two pillars and building two arches, a space transversal to the naves and of greater height is achieved. The vault consists of six panels with arches and torso ribs.
The head of the temple has a rectangular floor plan marked by the closing walls of the side chapels and the Old Chapter Hall, which shows a flowery Gothic style window on the outside. The Main Chapel with an irregular hexagonal plan, covered by a star-shaped vault, dates from the second half of the fifteenth century. The ambulatory has an interesting set of irregular vaults, some trapezoidal in plan and others pentagonal, in order to cover the space between the Main Chapel and the existing chapels on the sides and the chancel of the temple, dating from the early sixteenth century.
Finally, it is worth mentioning the cloister, a Renaissance work from the old Convent of La Merced, assembled in 1942 in the form of a gallery on the site of the old moat.
Inside the temple, the high quality of the grille must be highlighted, such as the Gothic grille of the Communion Chapel made in 1495 by Pedro Moreno, according to a design by Antonio Vivancos, the Choir Grille, the Grille of the Chapel of Santa Catalina (1538), the Grille of the Presbytery , a work made by Andrés Savania in 1549 according to designs by Jerónimo Quijano. Among the works preserved in its chapels are the "Altarpiece of the Virgin with Saint Peter and Saint Elizabeth", around 1500; the "Altarpiece of Saint Catherine", around 1530; The "Madonna del Pópulo", an anonymous Italian painting made around 1600 and the "Altarpiece of the Virgin of the Rosary", a work by Bartolomé and Antonio Perales made between 1735 and 1740.