The unknown Soria: Tera, a balcony to mystery

There is a part of Soria that, far from the infinite moorlands that characterize, for example, the vast expanses of the cigars in the fields of Almazán and Gómara, points towards that land of wines, pontiffs and miracles, which is La Rioja.

An area, where the villages barely reach, even exaggerating, the hundred inhabitants and whose loneliness, as the French poet, Paul Verlaine, would say, pierces the heart with their monotonous languor.

A land, however, where in the shade of some poplars, whose leaves are transmuted every autumn into happy and golden paper airplanes that the wind makes to land on roads where virgin land still prevails, it does not lack, however, stories turned into legends and mysteries still unsolved.

In this sense, it is not surprising that in Tera prevail, above many others, those impressive myths that speak of the terrifying giants that were once the masters and lords of the region.

And it is not, because if we are to be objective, we would have to admit the veracity of those ancestral myths and give them all the credit in the world, if we take into account that from this land through which today the traveler continues his journey with hardly any stop, come many of the remains of the great dinosaurs, whose terrifying fossilized bones are proudly exhibited in the Numantino Museum, located in the capital Soria.

But in Tera there are also other mysteries, distant in time but untouched for a History that tiptoes through them having lost track of some missing stones, which are barely mentioned in old medieval manuscripts.

The most relevant of them is the one that refers to one of the most important medieval monasteries, built in a Spain that was risking its future as a nation in the fight against the Muslim invader: the Benedictine monastery of Santa María de Tera.

No historian knows exactly where it was, but paradoxically, no one doubts its existence, since it is enough only to take a look at the old houses of the town, to see part of its immemorial remains used as filling material in walls to which the lime makes bones white as earth.

Nor do they doubt that in the area, apart from the terrible saurians of Prehistory, there was also an important activity of the cultures of a period, the Neolithic, part of whose dolmens and menhirs can be seen, also as filling in the interior of a church that, although very reformed today, still preserves a good part of its primitive Romanesque essence.

A church, which still preserves, in the carvings of its capitals and corbels, archetypes and reviews of a time when stone was the quintessential books of a people, clearly illiterate, which nonetheless kept alive the intuition towards the symbol and its references, becoming a reader of impressions that directed their attention towards socio-political interests marked by one of the factual powers of the time: Holy Mother Church.

But in addition, Tera, with her melancholic monotony, is also the head of the county of a region, called del Valle, which is characterized not only by the quality of its cattle, mainly beef, but also for being the first producer of a traditional product to lick fingers: the famous sweet butter from Soria.

There, where the fog always tends to always give its roads and highways an aspect of unreal surrealism, Tera, located in the vicinity of the mediatic Sierra de Cebollera (Onion's Mountain range), also looks towards the infinite deserts of some mountain ranges, the little-known Soria Highlands, but nonetheless rich in attractions, history and traditions.

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