The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

chess-board mouldings and with balls disposed at regular intervals. In the tympanum there is the Chrism upheld by two lions and around it three lines of Latin verse and a fourth below:

    I am the door of good fortune: pass through me Ye faithful. I am the fountain of life; more than wine do I quench your thirst; anyone may enter this blessed temple of the Virgin. Correct your faults first of all whereby you may be able to petition Christ. *

    After six centuries of existence in the wilds of the Sierra of San Juan de la Peña the nuns returned to Jaca, and in response to an appeal by Philip II, Pope Julius III granted them an old church dedicated to St. Ginés. On November 22, 1622, a solemn ceremony was held in Jaca when the sarcophagus, enclosing the remains of the three daughters of King Ramiro I, Doña Urraca, Doña Sancha, and Doña Teresa was translated from the derelict convent to their new resting-place in San Ginés. The sarcophagus with its carvings of Doña Sancha as abbess and its warrior scenes is without doubt one of the treasures of Romanesque art.
    From Santa Cruz, Anselmo and I mounted our mules whom we had tied to a tree near the convent. We now plodded up a road of loose stones through a gorge of the mountain of San Juan de la Peña. The vegetation became more alpine, with wild flowers in the hedges on either side, but soon after passing under beech trees the scenery became wilder with great boulders amid the pine woods, and we caught glimpses in the distance of the snow-clad Pyrenean peaks. All of a sudden, amidst the pines ahead of us we saw a massive boulder overhanging a cowering group of buildings, as though about to crash down and obliterate them forever.
    Anselmo, all the way along, had been preparing me for this aweinspiring sight by telling me the ancient legend of the monastery’s foundation.
    “One day,” he said, “about the year 732 a noble Mozarabic youth from Saragossa, Voto by name, went hunting deer in these mountains, and he chased a stag till it fell over the cliff you can see over there, and he and his horse would have fallen over too, but praying to St. John, he was able to rein in the animal, which stopped dead on the very edge of the precipice, thus miraculously saving Voto’s life. The young man dismounted and cirawled down the rock through the thickets. There he found the dead stag lying at the entrance to a deep cave. Inside he discovered a tiny shrine and on the ground lying dead, with his head resting upon a stone, a venerable hermit whose name, Juan de Atarés, was carved upon the stone. Voto buried the hermit, sold all his own worldly goods and with his brother Felix came to live in this cave, following the example of Juan de Atarés. Before they died they handed over their hermitage to two disciples Benito and Manolo and thus the fame of this saintly place reached the outer world.”
    “So,” I said, “this is a repetition more or less of the legend of Covadonga in Asturias from which sprang the little Kingdom of Oviedo which Alfonso III El Magno called Salus Hispaniae.”
    “In this tiny Sanctuary, amigo mio, was founded the Kingdom of Sobrarbe, which was to give birth to the Kingdom of Aragon. What Covadonga is in the west, San Juan de la Peña is in the east, for from this Sanctuary the great Alfonso I, the Battler, went out to win back Saragossa from the Moslem, and this Monastery of San Juan de la Peña is not only sanctified by the bones of saints but by the dust of kings who created the history of Aragon and its liberties, and eventually, indeed, the whole history of the glorious unified Spain of the Catholic Kings.”
    It is difficult to describe adequately the awe-inspiring setting of the monastery; the desolate loneliness, the harshness of nature, the terrifying sensation of being about to be crushed under the overhanging mountains. And ON each side of the cave inaccessible mountain spurs stretch out like gigantic arms, forming a narrow defile which is deep and inaccessible, for the only path of approach to the cave is one that descends by the overhanging cliff.
    It is amazing to think that under this overhanging rock, in this deserted spot, so many buildings were erected, for there were far more then than there are today; there were cells for all the monks, two houses for the abbot, guest houses, archives, library, hospital and a garden with a fountain, which still exists. There was even a printing-press, and a printer from Fluesca, called Juan