THE BISHOPS’ CLOISTER, MONASTERY OF SAN ESTEVAN, ORENSE
the carved stalls of the church were not spared; they were carried off by people who traded in work of that class. My peasant guide told me that he was born in the village on the slope above the monastery, and had often in his childhood been awakened on a dark night by the hammering and sawing of people who had come to rob the ruins. The monastic clock and the church organ were removed years ago to the Cathedral at Orense.
The monastic kitchen was a building quite separate from the monastery, with a road between; it also now stands in ruins, but is still a witness to the fact that cooking was a very important part of the proceedings. I should say that there must have been ample room for the housing and feeding of at least a thousand monks in that monastery; and what exquisite views they had from their windows, right across the deep ravine at the bottom of which the Sil had rushed ever since the days when the Romans extracted gold from its sand. One would think that the very thoughts and feelings of the monks must have been coloured by a sojourn in a spot so secluded, so romantic, and so beautiful!
Osera, in its shallow dip, is entirely shut in by billows of treeless and verdureless granite. San Estevan, balanced like an eagle’s nest at a dizzy height on the edge of a precipitous but wooded mountain crag, almost hidden among leafy trees, commands an indescribably beautiful, though somewhat limited view of all the mountain peaks around, of their thickly wooded slopes, and of the torrent below. Looking back upon the impression that each gave me, I should say that San Estevan’s position was the most romantic, the most poetic that I ever saw, and that Osera’s was the most extraordinary. The hermit who first discovered the spot where the monastery of San Estevan now stands must have been a lover of nature, of trees, of birds—an artist; the saint who first elected to dwell among the bare granite rocks of Osera must have sought unrestrained liberty for the eye and the foot, rather than a leafy nest, and have eschewed not only his fellow-man but nature as well.
The mountain on which the monastery of San Estevan stands was sprinkled in the early days of the Middle Ages with the cells of hermits, and the entire eminence was looked upon as sacred; one or two ancient oratories are still standing among the trees of the slope below the monastery. But during the same period the province of Orense had another eminence which it held as equally sacred—Mount Barveron. Cut in the rocky side of that mountain is to be found the most ancient monument of Christian art which the province contains. I allude to the church and ancient monastery of San Pedro de Rocas.
To reach this isolated spot we had to drive to the little village of Escos (Santa Maria de Escos), about sixteen kilometres from the town of Orense, and famed for its splendid hams. Our road mounted steadily the whole way, and skirted the mountain-side. At Escos the village priest gave us a kindly welcome, invited us to lunch at his house, and promised to provide us with suitable beasts on which to continue our expedition. An hour later we started off, our party consisting of two priests on horseback, and two Spanish ladies and myself on donkeys. A fine cavalcade, indeed; but alas! the mountain path up which we tried to proceed was composed chiefly of deep pools of rain-water and precipitous slabs of slippery granite. Our saddles were of the most primitive kind, our donkeys began to fight, and the two priests very soon found that their own feet were more reliable than those of their steeds. Those first fifteen minutes were truly a bad quarter of an hour. After many attempts to proceed in as fine a style as that in which we had started out, it ended in our all doing the pilgrimage on foot and dragging our useless steeds behind us, till, just as we were approaching our goal, a peasant appeared, and kindly consented to relieve us of our beasts and lead them back to Escos. Our way led through beautiful open country, strewed with boulders and jagged rocks, but by no means bare, for in between the granite crags there grew clumps of flowering broom and other shrubs, and beside every stone there peeped some flower or other. Brilliant blue gentians, purple heather, a kind of yellow primrose, daisies, violets, and buttercups, all enlivened the scene, and we seemed to be passing through a magnificent rockery. On and on we scrambled, over this boulder and round that crag, till we came to the side of a mountain precipice overlooking, not the sea, but a vast green valley, which stretched for miles on three sides of us.
Chiselled out of the live rock in the perpendicular side of the precipice we found the parish church of Rocas, whose villages are scattered over the mountain for miles around; this was once the church of the Benedictine prior of San Pedro de Rocas. Three rock-hewn chapels in a row form the three naves of the strange, crypt-like church, which is carved or scooped out of one solid rock, and measures about twelve yards in length and six in width. To the right of the church stands, like a gigantic campanile, a huge cliff, upon
