The patron saint of Giarre is Saint Isidore the Farmer, celebrated on 15 May with a procession in his honour; the town hospital is also dedicated to him. The cathedral, an imposing neoclassical building with three naves and a Latin-cross plan, stands on the site of an earlier church dedicated to Saint Agatha and the same Spanish saint, already existing in the early 17th century: work on the new temple, designed by Pietro Valente, began in 1794 and the church opened for worship in 1818. Also deeply felt among the faithful are the cults of Saint Sebastian, co-patron of the town, and of Saint Rita of Cascia.
In the hamlet of Peri stands instead the church of San Camillo, originally dedicated to Calvary: in 1871, for circumstances considered prodigious, it was renamed for Saint Camillus de Lellis, protector of the sick. Owing to growing devotion to the saint, on 1 June 1930 Bishop Evasio Colli laid the first stone of the new parish church, at the close of a diocesan Eucharistic congress; in 1935 the Camillian religious order itself arrived in Giarre.
