At the foot of the Pyrenean pass, born to serve travelers, the religious-hospital complex of Roncesvalles had its origin in the twelfth century and its first monumental construction in a large hospital called the Caritat. It was a Romanesque building with a rectangular floor plan, wide, simple, with a wooden roof over transversal stone arches. A wall remains of it that goes unnoticed by most visitors. Only the attentive eye of those who are aware of it is able to identify it next to the meadow in front of the church. 

Before 1215 the church, financed by Sancho VII the Strong, the chapel of the Holy Spirit and a second hospital area currently called Itzandeguía were erected. In the 14th century, the church was complemented with a refined, radiant Gothic cloister, smaller than that of the cathedral of Pamplona, and next to it, as a tower, the powerful chapel of San Agustín, inspired by the Barbazana of Pamplona. A defense tower at the foot of the church completed the set of buildings of B personality in the panorama of Navarrese Gothic. 

Between the 16th and 19th centuries new residential, hospital and service buildings (inn, mill, beneficiaries' houses, priory house, etc.) were added around the medieval nucleus. During this same period, all subject of repairs and remodeling altered the forms of the existing buildings, to the point that, by the 20th century, no medieval building was still standing as it had been erected.

The passing of the years, the extreme harshness of the mountain climate, the successive fires and the occasional military assault took their toll on the buildings. The roofs suffered especially, due to the intense snowfalls of a climatically adverse period that was called the "Little Ice Age" (1550-1850). In 1600 the weight of the snow collapsed the cloister, which was rebuilt years later with greater solidity. The canonical church also suffered from deterioration, which Canon Juan de Huarte lamented: "The other need that the church suffers from is in the buildings, which for the most part are collapsed due to old age and the misfortunes of fires and wars, mostly from the years 1512 and 1521, because they have never been built or repaired from purpose. Therefore, the little that remains is very tarnished and dismantled, being true that in no part of Spain is a sumptuous building so necessary".

In view of this status, between 1622 and 1627 they undertook a "modernization" of the church, which masked its interior with an envelope in the style of the time: they covered the cylindrical pillars and converted them into cruciforms, transformed the pointed arches into semicircular ones, hid the sexpartite vaults of the nave behind a half-barrel vault with lunettes and solidified the triforiums and windows. To finish off, a large altarpiece hid the lancets of the chancel. As a consequence, the interior of Santa María de Roncesvalles became a mockery of Herrerian formulas lacking in brilliance and grandeur. 

Photographs taken by Eugeniusz Frankowski in 1917 show that, despite the intense repristination, elements of the original structure were still visible, such as the arches and the vault of the presbytery, and the upper part of two windows of the apse. 

In the early years of the 20th century, the presence of these medieval vestiges awakened interest in recovering an architectural dignity more in keeping with the glorious tradition of the place. Between 1939 and 1944 a radical restoration was carried out under the direction of the architect Francisco Garraus and the priest Onofre Larumbe, correspondent of the Academy of History and member of the Commission of Monuments of Navarre. They applied a criterion common in the 19th and early 20th centuries, well-intentioned but not very respectful of the reality of historic buildings. It must be taken into account that institutions such as Roncesvalles, like a cathedral or a great monastery, are generally the result of a succession of constructive, ornamental and liturgical projects that translate their rich history into architectural forms. But Larumbe and Garraus yearned above all for unity of style and with this goal they sought to recover the early Gothic temple, for which they reworked the walls, eliminated additions, recomposed with cement the deteriorated or incomplete elements, and invented others that were either not preserved or had never existed, such as the staircase connecting the church and cloister, which they designed inspired by that of the castle of Loarre. The excesses of the restoration found civil service examination in the chapter itself and harsh censure among architects more careful with the traces of the past, among them Leopoldo Torres Balbas. His disqualification is well known: "Today [1945], desecrated to the core, it is a completely new church, a clumsy Gothic counterfeit from which beauty and emotion fled at the same time". It does not take an expert to see the inventiveness of Larumbe and Garraus when comparing, for example, the present western façade with the one visible in old photographs. The modifications to the door, the side windows and, above all, the gigantic rose window carved by stonemasons from Olite in a stone subject foreign to the Pyrenean region, are obvious. However, the excesses in the renovation did not betray all the values of the building, which continues to be an interesting example of early Gothic, inspired by Notre-Dame de Paris and other buildings in northern France.

The intervention on the church, the best known and most criticized of the Roncesvalles complex, had been preceded by another equally historicist intervention on the chapel of San Agustín, led by Florencio Ansoleaga, a correspondent of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and also a member of the Commission of Historic and Artistic Monuments of Navarra. In the early years of the 20th century he reworked the door of the chapel, the openings that flank it and the vault that precedes it, as well as the large window with the stained glass window dedicated to the battle of Navas de Tolosa (1908).

Less aggressive was the action undertaken around 1930, when they discovered and brought to light the funerary arcosoliums that give plasticity to the cloister walls.

Decades later, in the framework of the twelfth centenary of the Battle of Roncesvalles (778-1978), the Provincial Council of Navarre sought an architect with a proven track record to undertake a restoration that was known to be problematic, since it affected an atypical building: the Chapel of the Holy Spirit. It is a monumental "carnarium", consisting of an almost square well of several meters deep where, since the 12th century, the bodies of travelers and deceased neighbors were deposited. Over the well there was from the beginning a small celebratory space covered by a ribbed vault. The tradition baptized it as "Charlemagne's silo", in the erroneous belief that the emperor would have been its promoter and its destiny the burial of the defeated with Roland in the famous battle.

The chosen one was Francisco Pons-Sorolla, Chief Architect of the Monuments and Architectural Complexes Service of the General Administration de Arquitectura, who made drastic decisions. As he considered the effect of the single roof to be "deplorable", since it was not in keeping with the structural reality of the two differentiated elements, he decided to make the roofs of the chapel proper and the "cloister" independent by modifying their slopes. With the same determination, he eliminated the arcade of the "cloister" and removed the "false enclosures" of masonry and mud or stone mortar with wooden framework that limited the liturgical space. The renovation affected most of the building, including pavements, lighting, roofs, etc., giving it a truly different presence from the one inherited after almost eight centuries of existence.

The project of Pons-Sorolla included the substitution of the "corrugated iron" roof for "ceramic tablets of subject Pyrenean" that took very few years to show their lack of suitability. The harsh climate and the difficulty in obtaining suitable materials in such a remote place determined that, in parallel to the succession of styles, there was a succession of solutions for the roofs at Roncesvalles. The traditional procedure had consisted of roofing with beech or oak slats of 40 x 14 x 2 cm, highly flammable, which were possibly a determining factor in the voracity of the many known fires (1445, 1616, 1724, etc.). In 1930 this traditional system was recovered to cover the mill, in order to maintain the report "of the old Basque roofs". At other times, especially throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, tiles, stone slabs, slate, zinc, galvanized iron and fiber cement were tried, with mixed results.

The problem of roofs was still pressing at the end of the 20th century. With the intention of tackling it, an intervention was begun that was followed by many others up to the present day. The essay in the chapel of San Agustín with lead sheets revealed that the material had many more advantages than disadvantages. Once its ability to withstand the harsh Pyrenean winters was verified, it was decided to extend it to other buildings, including the collegiate church (1994-1998) and the priory house (1999-2000). The actions went beyond the mere replacement of the roofing material. For example, in the church it was necessary to decide on the design of the skirts, the closing of the triforiums, the intervention on the flying buttresses or the accessibility of the spaces. The campaigns on the heights alternated with others in which the object of attention were spaces as delightful as the crypt, with its 13th century paintings, or as challenging as the refurbishment of the old hospital to serve the unstoppable increase in pilgrims on their way to Compostela. 

One of the most spectacular transformations involved the medieval building of Itzandeguía, whose architectural value was hidden by the additions of the centuries. Although its rectangular floor plan, abundant windows and gabled roof camouflaged it as if it were a rural construction in keeping with a typology common in the Pyrenean valleys, the vestiges of arches, arrow slits and buttresses announced to the eyes of the connoisseurs that it contained something more. The problem was that the various uses, which included having served as a hayloft, stables, servants' quarters and residency program for carabinieri, had substantially altered its configuration. The large conference room measuring 30.90 by 8.80 m covered with a wooden roof over transversal stone arches had been divided into several floors with a multitude of rooms. Doors and windows pierced the walls here and there. Between 1989 and 1993, the original space was restored to its original rotundity, which allows us to evoke what the early days of the hospital were like.

Thus, since 1982 the Royal Collegiate Church has been the object of continuous and careful attention, much more respectful of the past than the historicist interventions described above. Unlike what happened decades ago, the work of architect Leopoldo Gil Cornet has received recognition among specialists and in 2012 he was awarded the award Rafael Manzano Martos de Arquitectura Clásica y Restauración de Monumentos. Paraphrasing the Benedictine Raul Glaber (11th century), we could say that the Collegiate Church has been able to shake off its old age to present its historical, welfare and religious values with dignity in the face of the new millennium.