Wooden vaulted churches in the Basque country: measuring units and their relation to 16th century naval structures

In CIMAD 11, Pedro Hurtado-Valdez presented an interesting paper on the myths and facts of the construction of Castilian wooden vaults between the 17th and 18th centuries, attempting to refute the belief that the genesis of wooden vaults in Spain and Latin America had its antecedents in the construction of ships in the Basque regions, and in the naval experience of some writers of previous centuries. A more in-depth study of the geometry of the structure of the wooden vaulted roofs of Basque churches of the 15th and 16th centuries, catalogued in Ars Lignea in 1996 by Alberto Santana and other authors, was an unfinished task that had hardly been addressed since that publication. In this article, we want to present our conclusions on the veracity of this hypothesis by comparing the codo de ribera, a standard measurement used in the naval construction from 1590 onwards, with the dimensions of the pairs of arches that form the barrel vaults of four churches analysed by laser scanner in the Gorbea valleys: Santa María de Goikuria, San Bartolomé de Olarte, San Pedro de Zaloa and San Lorenzo de Otzerimendi.