There is a fine view of the exterior of the church from across the square facing the southwestern angle. A row of acacia plumes and a meaningless, eighteenth-century iron fence conceal the marble paving round the base, but this foreground sinks to insignificance against the soaring masses of stone towers and turrets, buttresses and pediments, stretching north and east. Both façades have been considerably restored, the later Renaissance and Baroque atrocities having been swept away in a more refined and sensitive age, when the portions of masonry which fell, owing to the flimsiness of the fabric, were rebuilt. The result has, however, been that great portions, as for instance in the western front and the entire central body above the portals, jar, with the chalky whiteness of their surfaces by the side of the time-worn masonry. They lack the exquisite harmony of tints, where wind and sun and water have swept and splashed the masonry for centuries. The two towers that flank the western front in so disjointed a manner are of different heights and ages. Both have a heavy, lumbering quality entirely out of keeping with the aerial lightness of the remainder of the church. It is not quite coarseness, but rather a stiff-necked, pompous gravity. Their moldings lack vigor and sparkle. The play of fancy and sensitive decorative treatment are wanting. The northern tower is the older and has an upper portion penetrated by a double row of round and early pointed windows. An unbroken octagonal spire crowns it, the angles of the intersection being filled by turrets, as uninteresting as Prussian sentry-boxes. The southern tower, though lighter and more ornamented, has, like its sister, extremely bald lower surfaces, the four angles in both cases being merely broken by projecting buttresses. The lowest story was completed in the fourteenth century. It was added to in successive centuries by Maestro Jusquin and Alfonso Ramos, but its great open-work spire, of decided German form, probably much influenced by Colonia's spires at Burgos, was first raised in the fifteenth century. It is a complete monotonous lacework of stone, not nearly as spirited as similar, earlier, French work. The spire is separated from the bald base by a two-storied belfry, with two superimposed openings on each surface. Gothic inscriptions decorate the masonry and the huge black letters spell out "Deus Homo--Ave Maria, Gratia plena."