In the year 1561, two years before Siloé's death, the building was sufficiently completed to be opened for public worship, and consequently on August 17th of that year it was solemnly consecrated. The foundations and lower portion of the northern tower were executed about this time by Siloé's successor, Juan de Maeda. The tower was completed and partially taken down again during the following twenty years by Ambrosio de Vico. Then follows the main portion of the exterior work, especially the west façade (of the first half of the seventeenth century), by the celebrated, not to say notorious, Alfonso de Cano, and José Granados. The decoration of the interior, the addition of chapels and the building of the sagrario were continued through the latter part of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. [Illustration: Photo by J. Lacoste, Madrid CATHEDRAL OF GRANADA The exterior cornices of the Royal Chapel] The building operations thus extended over a period of two hundred and fifty years. Alfonso de Cano's reputation was of various kinds; the son of a carpenter and a native of Granada, as soon as his talents were recognized, he was apprenticed to the great Montañes. To judge from contemporaneous accounts, he must have been as hot-headed and quarrelsome as the Florentine goldsmith of similar talents and versatility. He was always ready to exchange the paint-brush or chisel for his good sword, and there was scarcely a day during the years of his connection with the Cathedral in which he was not enjoying a hot controversy with the Chapter. His favor with the weak monarch and the powerful ruling Conde-Duc was so great that they had the audacity to appoint him a prebendary of the Chapter after he had been forced to fly from justice in Valladolid on a charge of murder, as well as for having beaten his wife on his return from a meeting of the ecclesiastical body. The Chapter deprived him of his office as soon as they dared, which was six years after his appointment.