Still, a little more than a millennium after its first stone was laid, it continues to be a lighthouse of culture and devotion, which annually attracts a large number of pilgrims through the arduous mountain paths of the magnificent, imposing, legendary and supernatural Picos de Europe (Europe’s Peaks).
Carrying out the exhausting itinerary of this ancestral path of this pilgrimage route -which begins in the remote and no less supernatural ports of the Cantabrian Sea and which is called Camino Lebanensis or de la Liébana- not only means having an enviable physical shape, but also, to think, with full knowledge of the facts, that Faith, after all, is capable of moving both feet and mountains.
At least, when you get to this place, leaving behind places of rugged beauty, such as the suffered and dangerous gorge of La Hermida, and take a look around, that, precisely and no other, is the feeling that travelers and pilgrims who finally reach their sacred goal.
The one of treading with his feet a place that even the mountains and the Muslim raids of the Middle Ages decided to respect and safeguard, who knows if trusting in that sublime supernatural power that emanates from his greatest treasure and in addition, one of the greatest treasures of Christianity: the largest preserved and verified fragment of the True Cross or the element of martyrdom where Jesus Christ was crucified more than two thousand years ago.
What is anecdotal, furthermore, is that this old monastery was also a victim, in relatively modern times, of sacrileges and martyrdoms and that detail, together with its irreducible perseverance, makes any sensitive person feel it, not as a beautiful and immeasurable set of sacred architecture more or less reformed, but as what it really is: a true Place of the Spirit, where, above a simple matter of observances and goals, there is always the most sublime of experiences, which is none other, than that of Feeling.
NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property and therefore are subject to my Copyright.
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