Three miles from the watering-place of Amélie-les-Bains is the hermitage of St. Engracia in a green valley that once belonged to the Benedictines of Arles. The cell is in ruins, and the little chapel very poor. The walls are about four feet thick, and the dim light makes it seem like a cave. There is only one altar, with the virgin martyr of Zaragoza on it, a palm in her hand and a nail piercing her brow. Her legend is told in some old paintings on the wall. There are statues, too, of the Cossos Santos.
Coming down to Ceret, where the Albères sink into the plain, the Tech is spanned by an immense arch, by no means so pretentious in the spring, when the snow melts in the mountains and the waters come pouring down through the wild gorges, sweeping everything before them. A little way from the village is the hermitage of St. Ferréol on the plateau of a mountain. The road to it passes through vineyards, and is bordered by cherry, walnut, and other trees. The chapel is in such veneration that the peasants often used to ascend the mountain on their knees with a candle in their hands, in fulfilment of their vows, and perhaps do so still. Before it is a terrace shaded by elms, beneath which are two springs. Here is a fine view over the valley of the Tech extending to the very sea, while in the background are the everlasting mountains. In the chapel is a statue of St. Ferréol in the garb of a Roman soldier, with a sword in his left hand. He is said to have been an officer of some high grade, martyred for the faith at Vienne, in Dauphiné, in 303.
There is an altar here to Notre Dame dels Desemparats—the Catalan for abandoned or forsaken. There are times in every one’s life when one feels the need of invoking such a Madonna, and she may well be set up here in a solitude that harmonizes with the feelings of those who have need to appeal to her. To be friendless is solitude, says Epictetus. The women of Valencia wear combs on which is graven the image of Nuestra Señora de los Desemparados, but whether this is by way of bewailing their forsaken condition, or to announce their readiness to be consoled, or merely by way of averting the possible contingencies of life, we cannot say.
A Catalan inscription on the holy-water vase states that it was given by a hermit of St. Ferréol who had been a slave at Constantinople twenty-four years. The chapel is specially frequented in time of epidemics, and on the festivals of SS. Lawrence and Ferréol, when worship is conducted with great pomp, the Goigs never cease around the altars.
The hermitage of Notre Dame del Castel is on a mount belonging to the chain of the Albères, a few miles from the pretty village of Sorrède. The pathway up the height is bordered with violets, wild thyme, furze, and various shrubs. You pass three crosses, and a small oratory where the processions of Rogation week stop on their way to the mount to sing a hymn to the Virgin. The hermitage is in a fine position, shaded by trees, the terrace overlooking a vast extent of country with the immensity of the sea in the distance. In sight are several places of interest—the rock of Montblanc, where once stood a royal château; the Cova de las Encantadas, or the fairies’ cave; and, on the top of an isolated peak, the ruins of the old castle of Ultrera, which history says was taken by Wamba, King of the Visigoths, in the seventh century. Don Pedro of Aragon received its keys from Don Jaime of Majorca in 1344. Finally, it became the property of the lords of Sorrède. Marshal Schomberg took it from the Spanish in 1675, and the place his troops occupied is still pointed out as the Camp des Français. The castle being dismantled by order of Louis XIV., Jeanne de Béarn, who had seigneurial rights over it, took possession, among other things, of the ancient Madonna in the chapel, and built another to receive it. This statue had long before been miraculously discovered in a cave of the mountains. There is a singular expression of sweetness in the face, and both Mother and Child are considered muy hermosos. She is dressed in Spanish style, the veil that falls around her partly covering the Child. Great crowds come here on the festivals of the Virgin, where Mass is sometimes sung at an altar under the trees, and the people, spread around on the neighboring heights, give it the aspect of an amphitheatre.
Not a mile from the hamlet of La Roca, where Philip le Hardi in his campaign against Aragon lodged with all his court, is a pleasant valley watered by a limpid stream and shaded by trees. Out of it rises a low hill from which you can see the Albères and their forests of cork-trees, and among them the ruins of the castle of La Roca, where the king of Majorca took refuge from Don Pedro of Aragon. Here is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Tanya, with a well before it shaded by fine old plane-trees. On the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary the people of La Roca come here in procession. There are daily services during the octave, among which is the rosary at sunset. On the eighth day there is a Mass of thanksgiving, after which the people return processionally to La Roca.
Near the Coll de Prunet, through which passed Hannibal and the hosts of the Cæsars, is Notre Dame del Coll, shut in by the mountains and their forests of evergreen oaks and cork-trees—a popular chapel, where people come to pray to be delivered from the goître and all throat diseases common in the mountains. The Goigs contain the only accounts of its history, from which it appears that the chapel was built in the ninth century to receive a Virgin discovered by means of an ox. There is a painting over the altar of a herdsman and dog kneeling before the Virgin. The statue has been gilded, and the dress only allows the head to be seen. Here are manacles worn by captives in Moorish times, brought in gratitude for their deliverance and suspended before the image of Him “whose pierced hands have broken so many chains” other than those of material bondage. There is an altar, too, to St. Quitterie of Aire, to whom there are also special Goigs. She is invoked for hydrophobia.
About two miles from Argelés is the hermitage of St. Ferréol in a wild, solitary place among the cliffs of the Albères, the savage aspect of which is softened by the almond, fig, cherry, and oak trees. Before the chapel ran the ancient “Carrera de Espagna,” by which Philip le Hardi went with his army when he undertook the disastrous war against Pedro III. of Aragon, in 1285, continuing along beneath the castle of Ultrera to the Coll de la Massane. The chapel used to have two holes in the wall to receive the alms of the passer-by when the doors were closed. It has been restored from the ruin into which it had fallen, but is seldom visited.
On a bare rock not far from Argelés is the hermitage of Notre Dame de Vic, apparently very ancient, from the thick walls and low heavy arches of the chapel. Just below is a dark ravine lined with trees, and a cistern that catches the water trickling down the rocks. A family now lives in the hermitage. From it you can see over a vast plain, and beyond is the Mediterranean Sea, a perpetual beauty in itself.
The hermitage of Notre Dame des Abeilles is near the sea-coast, not far from the Spanish frontier, in a region once noted for its honey. In some seasons it is approached by the dry bed of a mountain torrent that comes down in the spring through the undulating hills covered with vines and olives. As far back as 1657 the chapel was known as the Capilla Antigua, and was famous for the perpetual miracle of its ever-open door which no human hand could keep closed. It contained one of those images which was “not willing to be shut up.” This was an old Madonna, black as that which Giotto loved to pray before, with a honeycomb in her hand, sweet to the taste as the knowledge of wisdom to the soul, reminding one of the spouse of the Canticles, whose lips drop as the honeycomb. People used to come from Spain to revere this Virgin, but it was removed for safety in 1793, and is now in the parish church of Banyuls-sur-Mer, where, as in ancient times, a lamb is offered at her altar on Whit Tuesday, the feast of Notre Dame des Abeilles, which is afterwards sold to the highest bidder to defray the expenses of the festival. On the top of a neighboring mountain, about two thousand feet above the level of the sea, may be seen the old historic tower of Madeloc.