The Church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán in Malaga, popularly known as the Convent of Santo Domingo, is a temple dating from the 15th century, built after the Christian conquest and originally located outside the medieval city walls. It is only part of the convent complex that occupied the block located in the northern part of the El Perchel neighbourhood, on the right bank of the River Guadalmedina.
This church is the canonical seat of the Cofradía de los Dolores del Puente, the Hermandad de la Humillación, the Hermandad de la Cena and the Congregación de Mena, all of which participate in Malaga's Holy Week. The church is also home to the Brotherhood of Nuestra Señora del Rosario, patron saint of the parish, which dates back to the 15th century.
The church reached its maximum splendour in the 17th century, when Fray Alonso de Santo Tomás enlarged and embellished the convent. Fray Alonso was bishop of Malaga and was the illegitimate son of Felipe IV. Today the square in front of the church bears his name. In the surrounding area there were large houses with doorways decorated with noble tiles that have disappeared. One of them was in Calle Huerta del Obispo, the recently restored Casa del Obispo, where Fray Alonso lived. His remains were buried in the Church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán.
Its exterior configuration is somewhat peculiar due to the demolition of part of the adjoining buildings, resulting in an irregular perimeter.
The church, architecturally, divides its interior space into three naves separated by semicircular arches on cruciform pillars, with Corinthian pilasters in recesses, which support a double entablature, crossed by a frieze composed of corbels with leaf decoration. The central nave is covered with a lowered half-barrel vault, divided by four transverse arches and two perpendicular ribs, which form a grid with medallions in the central part and lunettes cut with mixtilinear mouldings on the sides. At the foot of this nave is the narthex covered by a flat roof except at the edges, which curves into a quarter-barrel; above this space is the choir, closed off from the central space by a railing with a mixtilinear guideline.
At the head of this nave is the presbytery, which is accessed through a large semicircular triumphal arch. It has a quadrangular floor plan and is covered with a hemispherical dome on pendentives. The hemispherical cap is decorated with a central leafy medallion and flat ribs, while the pendentives are decorated with vegetal ornamentation and medallions with Dominican coats of arms and emblems, supported by angels. The side naves are structured in quadrangular sections between bent transverse arches, covered by hemispherical vaults on pendentives, and some remains of the original decoration have been preserved. Several chapels are attached to the epistle nave. The chapel of the Rosary has a rectangular floor plan with a tiled roof with a single-pitched roof. Attached to it is the chapel of the Virgin Mary, which has a substantially square floor plan covered with a half-barrel vault with sashes that reach down to the floor. In this chapel we can find a recently restored altarpiece, which was destroyed in the so-called burning of convents in 1931.
Access to the church is through the main façade located at the foot of the central nave. It consists of a doorway with a lintelled opening flanked by double Corinthian columns, with the intercolumniation showing the remains of the original sculptural decoration, which are quite deteriorated. The doorway is topped by a tripartite body composed of triangular pediments and an ogee profile with two ogee-shaped buttresses, which meet and are topped by a triangular pediment and a cross. Above the cross is a large oculus that illuminates the interior of the choir. Next to this doorway, at the foot of the epistle nave, there is another doorway under an unadorned arch, also topped by a smaller oculus than the previous one.
On the opposite side of the church, facing the river promenade, there is another door, at the back, which leads to a service courtyard from which there are various rooms functionally linked, to a greater or lesser extent, to the church. The buildings thus defined, between the main volume of the church and the outer limit, are presented as a group of semi-detached constructions, mostly two-storey, which are difficult to interpret in the fragmented urban context of today. This definition includes: The body that rises behind the presbytery current funeral chapel and former sacristy, with an internally chamfered floor plan and a three-slope Arabic tile roof; the current sacristy which, highly compartmentalised, occupies the space between the previous body and the head of the nave of the epistle.
Finally, attached to the heads of the central nave and the gospel nave are the rest of the parish rooms on two floors connected by narrow staircases, including a large hall on the ground floor that is the centre of the other rooms.
The Church of Santo Domingo de Guzmán has several images in its interior, most of which represent saints of the Dominican order. One of them is San Martín de Porres, a carving from 2012, made by the Granada artist Juan Patón, blessed on the 4th of February of the same year. It is a life-size image of dress (candlestick), made of cedar wood and polychromed in oil, it has a rosary of fifteen mysteries from 1978, a gift from the Father who commissioned the work, Don Francisco García.
Other images inside the church are the Santísima Virgen del Rosario, Santa Catalina and San Vicente Ferrer. For approximately five centuries this church housed the images of the Dulce Nombre de Jesús Nazareno del Paso and María Santísima de la Esperanza, which are carried in procession on the night of Holy Thursday, until they were moved to their own church, the Basílica de la Esperanza, in 1988 after the canonical coronation of the Blessed Virgin.