Most likely Magerit had been founded by the Moors, though, as soon as it had become the capital of Spain, its inhabitants, who were only too eager to lend their town a history it did not possess, invented a series of traditions and legends more ridiculous than veracious.
On the slopes of the last hill, descending to the Manzanares, and beside the present royal palace, the Christian conquerors of the Arab fortress in the twelfth century discovered an effigy of the Virgin, in an almudena or storehouse. This was the starting-point for the traditions of the twelfth-century monks who discovered (?) that this effigy had been placed where it was found by St. James, according to some, and by the Virgin herself, according to others; what is more, they even established a series of bishops in Magerit previous to the Arab invasion.
No foundations are of course at hand for such fabulous inventions, and if the effigy really were found in the almudena, it must have been placed there by the Moors themselves, who most likely had taken it as their[{324}] booty when sacking a church or convent to the north.
The patron saint of Madrid is one Isidro, not to be confounded with San Isidoro of Leon. The former was a farmer or labourer, who, with his wife, lived a quiet and unpretentious life in the vicinity of Madrid, on the opposite banks of the Manzanares, where a chapel was erected to his memory sometime in the seventeenth century. Of the many miracles this saint is supposed to have wrought, not one differs from the usual deeds attributed to holy individuals. Being a farmer, his voice called forth water from the parched land, and angels helped his oxen to plough the fields.
Save the effigy of the Virgin de la Almudena, and the life of San Isidro, Madrid has no ecclesiastical history,—the Virgin de la Atocha has been forgotten, but she is only a duplicate of her sister virgin. Convents and monasteries are of course as numerous as elsewhere in Spain; brick parish churches of a decided Spanish-Oriental appearance rear their cupolas skyward in almost every street, the largest among them being San Francisco el Grande, which, with San Antonio de la Florida (containing[{325}] several handsome paintings by Goya), is the only temple worth visiting.
As regards a cathedral building, there is, in the lower part of the city, a large stone church dedicated to San Isidro; it serves the stead of a cathedral church until a new building, begun about 1885, will have been completed.
This new building, the cathedral properly speaking, is to be a tenth wonder; it is to be constructed in granite, and its foundations stand beside the royal palace in the very spot where the Virgin de la Almudena was found, and where, until 1869, a church enclosed the sacred effigy; the new building is to be dedicated to the same deity.
Unluckily, the erection of the new cathedral proceeds but slowly; so far only the basement stones have been laid and the crypt finished. The funds for its erection are entirely dependent upon alms, but, as the religious fervour which incited the inhabitants of Segovia in the sixteenth century is almost dead to-day, it is an open question whether the cathedral of Madrid will ever be finished.
The temporary cathedral of San Isidro was erected in the seventeenth century; its[{326}] two clumsy towers are unfinished, its western front, between the towers, is severe; four columns support the balcony, behind which the cupola, which crowns the croisée, peeps forth.
Inside there is nothing worthy of interest to be admired except some pictures, one of them painted by the Divino Morales. The nave is light, but the chapels are so dark that almost nothing can be seen in their interior.