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Origin and history

The church of Saint-Étienne de Vilarasa, located in Saint-Cyprien in the Pyrénées-Orientales, is a Romanesque building dating back to the 12th century, with major restorations in the 19th century. The place, mentioned from the 10th century under the name Villa Rasa (farm or cleared estate), was an agricultural area today disappeared, whose church remains the only material testimony. Its Catalan name, Sant Esteve de Vilarasa, reflects this rural and medieval history.

Built in a swampy area, the church suffered repeated flooding, resulting in silt deposits. Its architecture combines a unique nave and a semi-circular bedside adorned with a Lombard arch (five arches in full hang on lesenes). The western façade, with a bell tower at an arcade (dated 1867), is the result of 19th century restorations. Inside, a former circular-vet baptistery, inscribed in a quadrangular masonry, was discovered after the lands were cleared.

The building reveals several construction campaigns. The first, in the middle of the 12th century (consecration in 1150), concerns the choir and the bahut wall separating the nave from the span. A second phase, at the end of the 12th–early 13th century, extended the nave. Finally, the 1867 works modified the façade and its junction with the side walls. The southern gate, up in the 19th century, reuses a destroyed Romanesque hanger to facilitate access. Classified as a Historical Monument in 1992, the church now belongs to the municipality.

The historical sources cite Vilarasa as early as 904 in an act of the cartular of Elne, but the present building dates only from the twelfth century. Its current isolation contrasts with its past role in a medieval agricultural estate, typical of the Roussillonian clearing. The interior arrangements (banquet, bentier) and the wall-bahut suggest a primitive liturgical organization, adapted to a small rural community.

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