San Salvador de Cantamuda

Gone are the immeasurable Picos de Europa, charming towns and villages, such as Potes and that enigmatic and at the same time suggestive Romanesque church of Santa María de Piasca, whose innumerable details always invite you to study or, at least, to exercise the right that entails. always that insurgent ally of free will, which is, I have no doubt, speculation.

The journey continues and the traveler knows, when he leaves the small town of Piasca behind and returns to the main road, taking the direction of Cervera of Pisuerga, and therefore descending towards the arid solitudes of the Castilian Plateau, that, once left behind the dangerous adventure of descending the so-called Palencia Mountain, somehow, intuitively, it is also traveling paths not only filled with beauty and overwhelming mystery, but also loaded with history and stories.

Possibly motivated by this and with the suggestive aim of allowing himself to be enveloped, as realistically as possible, by the magnetism of that peculiar environment -in the traveler's imagination, he and the modern vehicle he is driving disappear and in their place, appear rustic and heavy mountain wagons that advance, creaking their hinges, to the rhythm of the slow progress of the pairs of stout oxen that tirelessly pull them, guided by shadowy characters heading towards the quarries of Campoo- he decides to start the journey early, convinced of God helps those who get up early and wishing, if possible, to catch that fleeting moment, in which the curse looks the other way and allows the Sun and the Aurora to see their faces again, as was the case with the protagonists of the film 'Lady Hawke', whose original soundtrack, composed and masterfully performed by the symphonic rock group, The Alan Parsons Project's, sounds -casually or causally- at those precise moments, with the same mystery -compares the traveler- to that other one, of Mozart, titled 'The Magic Flute', which, according to experts, comes to suggest the senses due to its strong esoteric charge.

In some way, then, the traveler feels accompanied by those same medieval stonecutters, for whom he seems to be desperately searching, and always guided by the labyrinthine paths of his imagination, he thinks that he is traveling with them and that with them he leaves deep forests behind. , valleys that slide over the slopes of some mountains, generally wrapped in tatters, which remind him - letting himself be carried away by the subtleties of poetry - tears in the snowy dress of the Moon when she descends among the thorns to wash her face in the happy streams, where, oddly enough, trout and salmon still rule.

Halfway to Cervera, when the roughest of the descent seems to have come to an end, the traveler stops, disappointed, at the Piedrasluengas Gazer, an essential place to stop, if you want to have a formidable panoramic view of the Palentina Mountain as a whole, while in the town, located just a few meters from it, even the dogs seem happily abandoned to the sleep of the just and the traveler passes by, trying not to bother and admiring that remarkable yellow contrast of the jaramargo that grows in these parts. and that remind him -impossible not to get carried away by the thousand and one thoughts that assail his mind during each trip- that disease, xanthopsia, suffered by that brilliant painter who affirmed that "sadness will last forever": Vincent Van Gogh.

The traveler, like Van Gogh, also feels that eternal sadness when he thinks of the irreparable loss of a monumental historical, artistic and cultural heritage that, curiously, except for the Spanish themselves, has always been a reason for world envy. And he was walking through those thoughts when, entering Cantamuda and leaving behind the bridge that crosses the melancholic waters of the Pisuerga River, he meets again, for the third or fourth time, with one of his great Romanesque loves: the church of what in his day outside the singular monastery of San Salvador, built around the year 1123.

With its peculiar belfry, equipped with four small bell towers, whose sound, at Sunday masses, still manages to scare away the singular beings of Celtic mythology that still inhabit these lands and the depths of the neighboring mountains, the whole of its plant - the traveler shudders with his vision- is a whole poem to harmony: precisely, one of those qualities, together with moderation, proportion and balance, concepts with which Bernardo de Claraval -Saint Bernardo- defined God, the church of San Salvador, even though it could be said that endearingly rustic, is also one of the most consistent dishes -if the expression is permitted- of the spectacular Romanesque art that characterizes Palencia.

If austerity, understood, at least, from the sculptural part, characterizes the exterior, the interior of the church, however, once again surprises the traveler, since not only are singular carvings appreciated on the altar, on the other hand, supported by beautiful and tiny Romanesque columns skilfully figured, without no, also, because the presence, in some of the capitals of the nave, of the so-called 'green-men', confirms his first intuition, when the vision of the bell towers brought him to memory that function, it could be said that of 'exorcist', in the face of the deep-rooted myths of previous beliefs.

But the detail, which possibly draws the traveler's attention the most, is none other than the reunion with that figurative pair of oxen that accompanied him in his imagination, thinking about the time and the extreme conditions they had to overcome, both the medieval stonecutters who walked around here, like those other people, who, descending from those wonderful mountains, decided to try their luck in these lands that were beginning to be liberated from Muslim domination and, consequently, repopulated.

And, in addition, the presence of the oxen in that central capital inside the church, located on both sides of a wheel or solar disk, makes the traveler remember exciting readings, such as those of Roso de Luna and his theosophical -when not, determinedly esoteric- ramblings about the Santa Bovia and its presence in the 'dark' mountains of Asturias.

Without forgetting, of course, the beautiful, polychrome and splendid carving, which represents the owner of the church: the one that once made up other pilgrimage routes and which is still remembered, in all corners of the Principality, an ancient warning, not devoid of logic and sense, because, as he rightly says, 'whoever goes to Santiago and not to El Salvador -referring to the cathedral of Oviedo- visits the Servant and forgets the Lord.

RELATED MOVIE:

NOTICE: Both the text and the photographs that accompany it, as well as the video that illustrates it, are my exclusive intellectual property and, therefore, are subject to my Copyright.

Disclosure: Posts on TravelFeed may contain affiliate links. See affiliate disclosure.