The 12th-century late Romanesque church of San Juan Bautista is attached to a 10th-century Berber tower, which is 18 metres tall with a 9.4x7.4 metre floor plan and 1.75-metre thick walls on all of its three floors. Originally it was built with the rammed earth technique but then the structure was changed to stonework. The access door to the tower is hidden in a passageway that connects the tower to the church. Later on, the windows were opened up to place bells inside, and the tower was covered with a roof.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.