The Hidden Legacy of Beleña: Between Mendoza and Sacred Stone

Also in our next destination, Beleña de Sorbe, we encounter the combative figure of a Marquis, the Marquis of Santillana, who apparently put his skills as a military strategist to use in this part of Guadalajara. Here, we also find the hereditary imprint of one of the most powerful and legendary families in Spain: the Mendozas.

And also, as in the case of Tamajón, we find the intrusion of a style, the Baroque, which our greatest storyteller, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, disliked intensely, and which also severely distorted the original Romanesque sacred geometry of a church dedicated to the Apollo of Christendom: Saint Michael.

However, to our surprise, we observed that, in the case of this church of San Miguel, at least the original portal has survived, apart from some illustrated corbels, although the porticoed gallery, if it ever existed, was completely modified, also in modern times, losing a good part of its genuine original narrative.

On the main portal, housed within the archivolts, that peripheral support of information, we find, as we did in some villages of Aragon where a mysterious Master worked—whose anonymity leads to references to him being identified as the Master of Agüero or of San Juan de la Peña—a magnificent agricultural calendar, whose content, despite the Digital Age in which we are immersed and the advent of Artificial Intelligence, remains valid.

We also observed that among the pilgrim graffiti—that egocentric "so-and-so was here," which hasn't changed over the centuries—we also find that reference to travel that we've so often seen in these kinds of places, and which, of course, encourages us to follow the medieval example and make our journey a school of entrepreneurship and learning: boots or shoes.

We also love to see that, as in the case of Tamajón, here in Beleña too, the medieval and rural architecture still retains much of its original charm, although time and fashions have greatly altered the character of a town that is certainly worth visiting, even though its legendary castle is completely ruined.

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