On this occasion, I would like to invite you to participate in a very special trip, far from the big cities and far, also, from that happy and theoretically idyllic Spain of the golden coasts, the beach bars and the trendy nightclubs.
In fact, I would like to touch your heart and make you accomplices, even in the time it takes to read these lines, of a demonstration against oblivion and incidentally, contribute a grain of sand in favor of that Spain that does not appear in the tourist guides, which does not receive visits, except those of some lost traveler and contains a brutal message of cemetery and desolation.
August is possibly not the best month to voluntarily get lost in those infinite Castilian fields, under the laws of whose heat wave not even the cicada dares to disturb the silence of some suffocated fields in the face of the high summer temperatures, so, in any case, to turn a deaf ear, it is good to recommend that you carry a full gas tank in your vehicle and of course, a good supply of water.
That said, I comment that this cemetery of lost glories, which in its day was the town of Torralba de Arciel, is located in those millenary fields of the Soria region of Gómara, approximately distant from this, which is the judicial head of the party, about six kilometers away.
The highlight of the town and in fact, what prompted me to make this excursion into the mystery, is none other than its primitive church of Romanesque origin, from the 12th century, which still remains under the invocation of a mysterious saint, whose existence, in addition, historians question, but that, curiously, it is closely related to the outstanding places in a very particular element, water, so its presence in this metaphorical dry-land hell, which are the fields and lands of Gómara , it is still an interesting mystery: Santa Marina.
Of Romanesque origins, as has been said and of eminently rural design, the church of Santa Marina, curiously and despite the time, remains in a relatively acceptable state, which contrasts, in a sovereign way, with the ruins of the town.
It is found as soon as you enter the town and externally, although it has an original and flared doorway, on its south side and an apse or head of large proportions, it hardly has that socio-cultural information, which characterized churches of its kind, where in a statuary way, modern historians can get a fairly approximate idea of those aspects, both religious and social, that affected the mentality of the people of the Middle Ages.
It contrasts with a rural architecture, plunged into the most complete of ruins, where you can see what in its day were distinguished houses of more or less wealthy families and those others, simpler and by default, more affected by time and neglect, which marked the harsh living conditions of the peasants less favored by fortune.
Between them and since 1975, in which the town was definitively abandoned, the few remaining neighbors taking refuge in Gómara, they form a spectral group, whose mysterious remains suggest innumerable sensations of an archetypal nature, difficult not to experience when one It is found in places of such characteristics.
However, the attention is drawn to the surrounding cultivated fields and the presence, in one of the better-looking houses, of a worker, who comes from Gómara or the surrounding towns, such as Aliud, come to work the land and do some other related work, in the shade and quiet, of a town in a state of decomposition, which if it imposes during the day, at night it must be terrifyingly active, with the sound of the wind sneaking through the empty frames of doors and windows, the creaking of the old timbers and the inevitable collapse of the stones and adobe of the old facades.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and therefore are subject to my Copyright.
