The reredos on the chief altar is also worth inspection, it is thought to be the work of a Fleming; each niche containing a statue is decorated with golden lace. It is the only reredos of its kind in Spain. Every statue in it is said to be worth ten thousand (Spanish) dollars.
We next visited the Orense Museum. Here we found a stone bearing an inscription relating to the Burgas, or Hot Springs, which had once been erected near them by the Romans; the inscription was in honour of the nymphs who were supposed to haunt the springs. Here also we found several interesting stone sarcophagi; one was that of a converted Jew of Monforte who spent a great deal of money on the churches; his name was Gaibor, and he flourished in the eighteenth century. Here, too, were specimens of good Roman mosaic, taken from the Roman baths in the neighbourhood; some Byzantine capitals; a sarcophagus bearing an inscription in the Gallegan dialect, from the fourteenth century; a sarcophagus of the fifth century without a cover; a bronze cross of the fifth century; some Roman pens; some Roman amphoras; bronze hatchets found in the bed of the Miño; and a number of arrow-heads, some of green serpentine, others of stone. Among the documents were some Papal Bulls and other parchments in a glass case. One of the things that interested me most was a musical instrument of mediæval structure; it had a handle like a barrel organ, but its strings and screws were like those of a violin. I am told that this strange kind of instrument is still in use among the blind musicians of Galicia; and there are two of them represented in the Orense Pórtico de Gloria, two of the four-and-twenty elders are playing them by turning the handle. In this museum we also found a good specimen of the Gallegan bagpipe, or gaita. It was here that Señor Macìas showed me a recently completed plan of the old Roman road that passed through Orense from Braga to Astorga, at which he and several other archæologists had been working for some time. The walls of the museum are hung with old paintings, some of them being portraits of the family of San Rosendo, brought from the monastery of Celanova. But perhaps the most treasured object of all is the stone with the Roman inscription which Señor Macìas and his friends had such difficulty in removing from the site of the ancient Civitas Limicorum.
The name of Orense is derived from the Latin word Aurea, “golden,” and was the name given to the town by the Romans. As we have seen elsewhere, the great pride of Orense is the fact that the Sueve kings Carriarico and Teodomiro abjured Arianism within her walls after hearing of the miracles of St. Martin of Tours, and through the preaching of St. Martin of Dumio, after there had been more than a hundred years of strife between that heresy and the Catholic Faith, a strife which brought with it all the evils of a civil war. Six centuries later the monastery of the Franciscan Order was established within the walls of the city. Soon after its completion, in a quarrel between Bishop Yanez de Noboa and the monks, a man who had killed a member of the Noboa family in the street took refuge with the monks, and as they refused to deliver him up, the citizens burned their monastery to the ground. A few years later a new monastery was begun on the site where it now stands, on a hill just above the town, to the east of the Cathedral; this was finished about the middle of the fourteenth century. It is now used as a barracks for an infantry regiment, but its architecture is well preserved and quite worth a visit; it has a beautiful fourteenth-century Gothic cloister with graceful arcades resting on double shafts, every capital having different sculpture. The façade of the church has a fine Gothic door with three columns on either side, and some quaint sculpture on their capitals. This church has one nave and three apse chapels; its form
CHURCH OF AQUASANTAS
TOWER NEAR MONTERREY, ORENSE