THE FIFTEENTH-CENTURY BANNER OF OUR LADY OF GRANADA.
CHAPTER XIV
The Convento de la Luz—The Poor Clares and the Conceptionists—Our Lady of Montemayor—A fortified religious house—The ribats of Spain—The ancient refectory—Arabic inscriptions in the Nun’s Chapel—The Portocarreros—Family tombs—A night at San Juan—The shyness of the nun—An early start—Mossen Bethancourt and the Canary Isles—The beginning of the floods.
“You who are so interested in everything old should not leave Moguer without seeing the Convento de la Luz,” said Conchita as we drove back from La Rabida. “I will take you there to-morrow morning if you like, before you start for the train. Formerly no one except the clergy could enter any part of the convent, for it belonged to the Poor Clares, and you know how rigidly closed the Order is. But now they are all dead, and the convent has been sold or let or lent by the Duke of Alba to the Conceptionists—the teaching branch, not the closed one—and the Reverend Mother lets me take in visitors at any time. All the aristocracy of Moguer send their daughters to be educated there, and they have free classes for the poor as well. It enlivens our circle having the Conceptionist nuns there instead of the Poor Clares.”
She went on to tell me that the convent had become hopelessly impoverished, though it was once one of the wealthiest in the district. The Clares seem to have lived like private ladies, each with her little suite of rooms, bedroom, sitting-room, and kitchen, and even her own share of the walled garden. Each had her own woman servant, who lived not in the convent but in the town, coming in and out daily to attend to her mistress’s wants. Anything less like the accepted idea of monastic life I never heard of; and when I saw the bright sunny little flats partitioned off by the nuns for their private convenience, I wondered still more how such a conception of asceticism could have lasted down to the end of the first decade of the twentieth century.
“Reverend Mother says,” pursued Conchita, “that the one Poor Clare who still lived when the Archbishop of Seville sanctioned the transfer to the Conceptionists, was the tiniest creature she ever saw, quite imbecile from age, and withered and shrunk up just like a doll. They had been gradually dying off one by one, until this little old woman was the only inhabitant of the convent, which is so large that it contains a dormitory a hundred feet long, while the central patio is a hundred feet square. There are many beautiful objects of art there even now, and they say that formerly it was a perfect treasure-house. No one knows when it was built, but the Pinzóns’ ancestors, the Portocarreros, whose monuments you will see there, were very rich, and they always protected the convent. What date was that? Oh, I don’t know, but it was before the discovery of America; and of course after that, when everybody grew rich, the convent got more gifts than ever. But you can fancy what went on in later years, when the Poor Clares were getting older and more helpless every day, and more dependent on their servants. They say that those women never went in without securing some valuable work of art to carry off and sell, though where they sold them no one knows, for they were never offered in Moguer. Of course not! No one here would buy valuables robbed from the nuns. Well, that is all over now, and no one will steal what is left. The Conceptionists are not poor at all (though of course they always want money for their free classes) and they take great care of the pictures and tiles, and everything else that those bad servants could not carry away.”
Truth to tell, I did not expect to find much that would interest me in the Convento de la Luz, imagining from Conchita’s account that it would be a fifteenth-century building of the type so frequently found in this part of Spain. The wealthy and powerful families of Arcos and Medina Sidonia set the fashion at that time of lavishing their riches on building and restoring convents and monasteries, and of course every great noble with plenty of money followed their example. Too often the gold which poured into Andalucia after the discovery of America was spent on barbaric display of carved and gilded woodwork, chased silver, and costly draperies, more conspicuous for their money value than for their beauty: and I confess that I rather disliked the idea of spending a couple of my few hours at Moguer in visiting such a monument, when I might have driven out to the hermitage of Our Lady of Montemayor. For Our Lady of Montemayor had been worshipped as far back as the ninth century, when Palos de la Frontera was an outpost of the Spanish Christians, who, although they forgot their language during the many centuries of Moslem rule, steadily maintained their religious beliefs.
But it was impossible to refuse the invitation of my kind and courteous little friend, and I agreed to go with her to the convent next morning instead of making an expedition into the country.