Visit Yuso

THE VISIT

A valley, a monastery and a town are all brought together by the same name: San Millán de la Cogolla. There is no need to eulogise upon the exuberant beauty of the countryside - it is here simply to delight the eyes and to calm the spirit. Should you meet a visitor, either a pilgrim or a tourist, who has come here to hurriedly say his prayers or to collect fleeting images, just take him by the hand and make him stop to look at each bend in the road, at each stone, at each page of the numerous unique parchments and books. For San Millán de la Cogolla is a place that is pulsating with half of Castilian history, as well as a fair amount of the history of Navarre and a number of the other more outstanding chapters in Spanish history.

It all began with the little shepherd who God chose for an anchorite, who the bishop ordained priest, and who his disciples made into an abbot. He lived for a long time - over a hundred years, born in Berceo in 473 a.d and died in 574 a.d. He handed out miracles as others handed out charity bread: without looking at the person to whom he was giving. Thus it should come as no surprise that Seventh-Century Spain, which needed myths and landmarks to give it an identity, was to discover in the tomb of Saint Millán a veritable magnet for prayers: Saint Braulio of Zaragoza wrote the Life, Saint Eugenio, a poet, wrote down Saint Millán's liturgical prayers and dedicated some emotional Latin distichs to him. This was almost 634 a.d., and there were already monks and pilgrims flocking to Suso.

In the Tenth Century, Castille and Navarre, sometimes in harmony and at other times at each other's throats like unreconcilable neighbours, managed to settle this land together for Christian culture. They were interested in attracting the already ancient monastery of San Millán into their sphere of influence, because it was building colonies, copying out codexes and providing the Court with scribes. Consequently, Castilians and Navarrese vied together in granting privileges to the monks. In 1030 Sancho el Mayor, who was reinventing the Santiago pilgrim path, ordered the excavation of Saint Millán's relics, to put them on display as an encouragement to prayer. His son, García el de Nájera, began the construction of a new monastery at Yuso because there really was not so much space left in the crush at Suso. The work was finished in 1067, in the days of Sancho IV el de Peñalen, around the same time as the marble reliquary was completed.

Among those sanctified in the monastery were Domingo de Cañas or de Silos, Oria la emparedada (the anchorite), and Pedro, an abbot, who was the most skilled at copying out and decorating codexes. There was another abbot, Blas, a go-getter par excellence, and a monk named Munio, to whom we owe the first, almost literary text in the Spanish language. Later, there would be Fernando the monk, a confidant of Alfonso VI, and another Fernando whose Latin was excellent and his imagination even better, so much so that he made credible some of the events which did not seem too certain historically; there was the poet Gonzalo de Berceo, who was caligrapher to Felipe II, friar Martín de Palencia, Cardinal José Sáenz de Aguirre, friar Plácido Romero, the archivist and medaevalist, Father Toribio Minguella the venerable, the polygraph, and in more recent times, Father Joaquín Peña.

So much history, so much knowledge, so much sanctity, all squeezed together within such a small space, have made Unesco recognize that San Millán de la Cogolla must be protected at all costs, as part of the heritage of mankind.

Yuso Monastery

Let us leave behind memories and get down to palpable reality: Yuso represents a lyrical yearning, as well as a civil monument. In Yuso the monastic life has been more tenacious than the very stones: the Roman stonework disappeared in 1607, to be replaced by the present Renaissance construction, but it has continued to be a monastery because a community of monks still dwells within it. If we added up the years spent here by the monks who were followers of the founder Saint Millán, plus the period of the monks who were ruled by la Regla de Saint Benito, and then added that number to the period in which the present, peaceful Augustine monks have lived here, we would be left with a total of a good fourteen and a half centuries. I do not think that any other Spanish monastery could boast such a long tradition.

The fachada (facade) by which we enter the monastery was completed in 1661, and was the work of the architect Pedro de Basave, with sculptures by Diego de Lizarra: one enormous relief shows Saint Millán just as our grandparents tried to imagine him, on horseback and beheading Moors; the picture is a simplification of the large canvas that presides over the altarpiece, painted by Juan Ricci in 1654, and the subject (the appearance of Saint Millán during the battles of the Reconquest, as did the apostle Santiago) seems to be a recognition of the Saint's patron status for Spain.

The first room we visit is called Salón de los Reyes (Salon of the Kings) because of the four paintings, all by the aforementioned Ricci, which show Fernán Gonzalez, Sancho el Mayor, García el de Nájera and Alfonso VII of Castille. We continue along the processional cloister, which is Renaissance-style with Gothic touches in the vaulting and plateresques in the decoration, but which remains unfinished for it seems that among the abbots of the Sixteenth Century, the money generally finished before the constructions did. When night falls and the birds become silent, this cloister is one of the few places where one can savour the silence and the music of the spheres that friar Luis de Leon dreamed of. The figures 1554, inscribed over the magnificent door which provides access to the church, give us the year in which it was completed.

From the cloister we pass along to the church, the pride of the Benedictine community and which was built between 1504 and 1540. In 1595 the north-east wall was demolished, and the vaults had to be lowered and laid upon strong walls, which now join columns and lateral master walls. Even after this process of reconstruction, the dimensions are amazing. The Retablo Mayor (Large Altarpiece) was devised by the abbot Ambrosio Gomez, who in 1653 brought the best of the baroque cloister painters, friar Juan Ricci, from the villa and the Court to paint the eight canvases which decorate the space. It is worth stopping to admire the grillework, which was completed in 1679 in the forge of Sebastián de Medina. There are many more things to admire: the organ, the retrochoir and its magnificent carvings, the rear of the parish pulpit, the bold light of the upper choir and the medallions on the vaults.

In the sacristy an explosion of colour emanates from the frescos on the ceiling. It is dedicated to Our Lady, who presides over the arrangement in the form of an excellent carving from around 1700, and to whom four Marian doctor saints pay court from the corners of the barrel vault. We cannot fail to admire the collection of Flemish coppers mounted above the sacristy chest of drawers, or the four Neapolitan canvases mounted on the wall to the right of the spectator; all of these pieces are from the second half of the Seventeenth Century.

Climbing the staircase that rises from beside the sacristy door, we arrive at the upper cloister, full of light and space, and which is the work of the Italian Andrés de Rody, according to a contract signed by the architect and the abbot Pedro de Medina in 1572. Since Rody completed the work, no alterations have been made apart from the addition of windows and french windows, to protect the space from inclement weather and to make it more comfortable for the monks, who spend most of their time here. Twenty-four oil canvases narrate the life of Saint Millán. When Jovellanos visited the monastery in 1795, he said that he had read on one of these paintings Spinosa faciebat 1662, which gives us the name of the artist and the date. However, we cannot be totally sure about this, because his lifetime did not provide Espinosa with enough time to paint even half of these paintings; it would be therefore unwise to attribute the other half of the paintings to him.

In one of the corners of the cloister there is an exhibition hall containing a great deal of things to see: more paintings by Ricci, new Flemish coppers, various sculptures in wood or, protected by display cases, the marbles that were reproduced from those that were carved for Saint Millán's relics in 1067, and which constitute, without any doubt, one of the art treasures of Spain. Near to these, in another display case, there is the small chest for the relics to which the marbles were mounted; the chest is still lined with Arabic silk from the first half of the eleventh century. During the war of independence in 1809 it was stripped of the gold and precious stones in which it was covered.

If we move across the cloister to the corner opposite the exhibition hall, we can finish our visit by descending the noble staircase, architecturally well-designed and with an attractive balustrade. Carved beneath one of the lions holding the shields of the monastery and the crown of Castille is the year that this work was completed: 1697.

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