Anyone who has traveled these paths, either as a hobby or setting a transcendental objective, knows well what I am talking about, because in his itinerary he has frequently encountered those sacred ruins that have indicated the decadence of an Art, which was once a metaphorical beacon of light, hospitality and spirituality.

Many of them, like this memorable and unrecognizable dispossession of what once was, believe it or not, one of the most important Benedictine monasteries in the Iberian Peninsula, surprises travelers and pilgrims who are about to reach a town, Villafranca Montes de Oca, which once had a terrible reputation for the numerous groups of bandits that infested its rugged mountains.

But all, without exception, deposit their stone on the cairn that can be seen to one side of the ruins and the road, as a tribute to a tradition that even the Church has never been able to eradicate completely: the desire to win the favor of the ancient gods of the roads.

It is the Janistic Castile, the Castile of the two faces: one of them is that which looks to the future shuddering when its peoples are bleeding from youth and the other, stubborn, totally reluctant to let its traditions die, even when it assists impotent to the loss of their cultural and spiritual heritage.

And yet even the least keen eye warns, even casuistically commiserating, the greatness that still beats in what was once great.

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