Frómista: a jewel of the Romanesque in the Miracle's Village

Santiago's Road and its wonderful stories, capable of breaking, with its strength, the insurmountable barriers of time.

Also known as the Way of the Stars and the Way of the Milky Way, it offers a wonderful spiritual game, in which the pilgrim is circumstantially involved, trapped, metaphorically speaking, in some keys that must be unraveled from stage to stage, until arriving to your destination, either in Compostela or a few kilometers further, in the Finis Terrae.

In that hard Palentine steppe, known as the Gothic Fields, set as a small oasis of immemorial culture, Frómista continues to dream, melancholy anchored in the Palencia plain - 19 kilometers from the stately Carrión de los Condes and about 30 from Palencia capital- with the importance it once had.

It is not surprising, therefore, that his wonderful church, dedicated to the figure of St. Martin - that of Tours, which is always represented by splitting his cloak to give half to a beggar beaten with cold - rest of what, there by the year 1118, it was one of the most important Benedictine monasteries of the Middle Ages, considered the best and brightest example of an art, the Romanesque, which was not in vain considered the quintessential expression of Christianity.

This stone score, whose notes are the perfection of Sacred Geometry is, at the same time, an invitation to travel the intricate paths of the Unconscious, challenging both curious, researchers, tourists and pilgrims, to navigate the winding rivers, metaphorically speaking, of the Myth and its stylized means of expression: the Archetype.

Both the theme of the wonderful capitals of its interior - where there is no lack of references to previous cults, such as that of Cibeles, goddess of the Underworld who is seen with her staff driving the reins that hold two fierce lions by the neck, as well as the figure of the Great Goddess, represented as a face from whose mouth emerges an authentic whirlwind of life in the form of beings and animals, including the Celtic snakes or wouivres, those telluric currents that circulate on the earth, the great knowledge of apothecary, demonstrated in the capitals whose theme is clearly foliar, or even the fables with meaning, such as the raven and the fox and the figure of the Jew, always identified with greed, in whose sack a five-pointed star is seen - like the more than two hundred Canecillos of the outside, constitute a small encyclopedia that induces not only to raise the look, but also to think.

Interesting, moreover, is the presence, in one of its side chapels, of a controversial figure: that of Our Lady of the Way, a Black Virgin to whom the verses that King Solomon put in the mouth of the Sulamite, the queen of Saba and what they said about 'I am black, but beautiful, daughters of Jerusalem ...'.

From the miracle of Frómista, similar to the one that the pilgrim returns to meet at the top of O Cebreiro, the patera is preserved, with the traces of the host that refused - as it sounds - to be moved when the priest offered extreme unction to a dying that he was in mortal sin for having dealt with a Jew. Politics, then, at the service of the State and Religion.

Frómista, in addition, is also the birthplace of that holy man to whom all sailors used to pray and for whom that effect is known, so feared in medieval times, that bears his name: San Telmo.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the vicinity of a city with so much Art, with so much miracle and being a place of hospitals and inescapable point of the Way, the Knights Templar founded one of their most important encomiendas, located about six or seven kilometers away: Villalcázar de Sirga.

But Frómista, in addition, is also famous for its hospitality and for the variety of inns and restaurants, where visitors can rest peacefully and savor the delicious food and tasty wines of the land.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.

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