Black and White Romanesque Art Notebooks

The wind beats it on all four sides, while its arcaded gallery contemplates, with impassive melancholy, a saw, that of Guadarrama, which at the time they built it, 12th century, called, and perhaps with more than just symbolic reason, the Saw of the Dragon.

It is not known who was the Master who built it, or if there was a village by his side, disappeared in the maelstrom of a hungry Titan, called Time.

Perhaps from its origins, she was always an orphan: lonely and outside the walls - like the old pagan altars - of all and nowhere.

They say that the arcaded galleries of all Romanesque churches were mainly due to two fundamental questions: one of an eminently practical nature, such as giving shelter to the faithful of inclement weather and another of a symbolic and spiritual nature, as representative of the doors of Jerusalem, the Holy City.

Counting the main one, there are eight arches of his gallery, sacred number, which among other things represented the idea of renewal and resurrection, being frequently found, perhaps for this reason, in the starry domes of the great Gothic cathedrals, which house the graves of relevant characters.

By its name, of the Virgin of the Vera, it is very probable, in addition, that for the peasants it supposed an added protection of the fields, that like the wind that bats them, it also has them, by its four sides.

For the polychrome stucco of which its main cover is made, it can be considered as unique in its kind, if not for another curious example of a church, attributed to the Knights of the Order of the Temple, which is located in the neighboring community of Soria , which is considered if not the most, one of the coldest villages in Spain: Castillejo de Robledo.

Lonely and enigmatic: the Segovian church of the Virgen de la Vega. Nine hundred years of imperturbable beauty.

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