San Nicolás church stands in the suburb of the same name outside the walls, a medieval quarter inhabited by Christians and dedicated to agriculture and sheep farming. It also had a large number of Mudejar residents. It was built in Caleno granite in the late-Romanesque style of Ávila between the second half of the 12th century and the beginning of the 13th. The upper end and porches remain from the original construction.
The three entrances take the form of semi-circular arches with archivolts. The northern entrance is the most ornamental and is decorated with wedges, palmettes and ivy leaves, which are very typical motifs on Romanesque churches in Zamora. The capitals of the archivolts have plant motifs.
The tower is built on to the upper end from the North. It is divided into three bodies and shows two periods of construction. A Vetton animal sculpture was reused for the plinth.
It has three naves: the central nave opens into a large apse and the side naves into rectangular chapels. Except for the upper end, the temple was covered with Baroque-style plasterwork in the 17th century.
References:Saint-Georges de Boscherville Abbey is a former Benedictine abbey. It was founded in about 1113 by Guillaume de Tancarville on the site of an earlier establishment of secular canons and settled by monks from the Abbey of Saint-Evroul. The abbey church made of Caumont stone was erected from 1113 to 1140. The Norman builders aimed to have very well-lit naves and they did this by means of tall, large windows, initially made possible by a wooden ceiling, which prevented uplift, although this was replaced by a Gothic vault in the 13th century. The chapter room was built after the abbey church and dates from the last quarter of the 12th century.
The arrival of the Maurist monks in 1659, after the disasters of the Wars of Religion, helped to get the abbey back on a firmer spiritual, architectural and economic footing. They erected a large monastic building one wing of which fitted tightly around the chapter house (which was otherwise left as it was).