The church of Saint Catherine, also known as Saint Katarina's or simply Saint Karin, was originally built by the Franciscan order as a monastery church for the Visby convent that was founded in 1233. According to the Franciscans' concept, the church was built with a long, narrow nave covered with three groin vaults and a narrower, straight-ended choir. Traces of a bricked-up window in the preserved part show that they were round-arched and paired in each bay. The western part and the southern walls of this first church are still preserved in the current building. The church, which was completed in 1250, was dedicated to Saint Catherine of Alexandria, hence the original name St. Katarina. Later, the church became mostly referred to as St. Karin.
In the beginning of the 14th century, a major rebuilding of the church began but it was interrupted during Valdemar Atterdag's conquest in 1361, with only the choir completed. In 1376, the construction resumed, now with a completely new choir consecrated in 1391. Parts of the old church were (and still are) preserved in the south wall and parts of the west wall. The new church was built larger than the old one by extending it to the east and north.
When the last vault was in place in 1413, St. Karin was one of Visby's largest and most beautiful churches, at least on the inside. The visitors were enchanted by its grandeur and beauty as the light faded in through the tall colored glass windows and spread its heavenly glow into the chancel. All the windows are in Gothic style except for the windows in the remaining parts of the original church in the west, whose windows are round-arched. Many stonemasons worked on the construction of the church and placed stonemason marks on their various works, not least on the outside of the chancel, and the church is rich in interesting details. The vaults were built of brick instead of limestone which was commonly used in Visby. In the chancel, there are wall niches with fine profiling worth seeing. In the portal to the sacristy, there is a fine rose in relief. According to a legend, monk Johannes made a pilgrimage to Saint Catherine's grave in Sinai and brought back to Gotland one of the anemones from her grave. He then had the anemone carved over the choir portal sometime between 1374-1384.
The Reformation around 1530 hit most churches hard. St. Karin seems to have fared better, at least initially, because during the 1540s church services were still going on. But one Sunday afternoon during the service a vault started to collapse. After that, no more services were held. The abandoned convent was temporarily set up as a hospital for the care of the poor and sick.
St. Karin began to deteriorate more and more and the county lord Otto Rud complained about ten years later about the state of the church after the collapse. "Since then, the church has been open to dogs and pigs, so there was a stench in there so God have mercy".
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the decay of the church continued. Both the city itself and private individuals began to take building materials from the facility. At the beginning of the 1730s, there were plans to put the church in order as a German church "for the service of foreign manufacturers", it was said in a statement, but the plans were not carried out due to cost reasons.
In recent times, St. Karin has become an important part of the town life again. Here, a wide variety of activities are organized, such as fire circus, music events, Christmas markets, and ice-skating discos.
