So today we headed off early in order to do the two monastery tour which we had enquired about yesterday. We walked into San Millán and headed off in the minibus up to the Monasterio del Suso with a small group of primarily French tourists for a Spanish tour. The scenery was spectacular. This particular monastery, named from the Latin word for above, was the place where San Millán initially gathered with his followers. He was a shepherd from the local area who, at the age of 20, had a vision suggesting he should spend his life in the service of God. He soon built a following, and used to congregate in the caves with his followers. When it became obvious that there were too many people to accommodate in those caves, the first church was built. This incorporated the original cave structure. One of the altars dated back to the sixth century, and there were some beautiful tiles which encased a relic of one of his miracles. This place has always been near the pilgrim route to Santiago, and he was renowned for performing miracles on some of the pilgrims. For example, he made a blind man see, a limp man walk and revived, a child. Another of his miracles involved helping out when it was attempted to build a barn, but one of the wooden struts was cut too short. The strut was then left with the Saint and was subsequently of an adequate dimension to build the barn. The relic of the remainder of this strut was encased by the mudejar style tiles.
We then walked back down the hill ready for the visit of the second monastery. This was altogether a different experience, and it was the first time we had felt like we were herded in a massive group of tourists!! There were probably about 40 people in the tour, which was way too many. There was also no audio or written info, just a Spanish-speaking guide so we decided we wouldn’t bother too much about following the detail of the tour, but would just soak up the general atmosphere and have a good look at the monastery. It was not possible to do a self guided tour, you could only get in with the official guide. Both these monasteries were listed as heritage sites in 1997. The importance of this location was due to the fact that it was the first time that elements of Castilian and also Basque language had been noted in written form. The language of written texts was Latin, but the language used by people in the locality was early Castilian. One of the monks in this ministry had noted some of this Castilian romance language in the margins of one of the Latin texts.
These annotations were known as the Glosas emilianenses. They started to appear in the 9th century to clarify the Latin scripts. They are now housed in the Real Academia de La Historia in Madrid but there is a copy in the Yuso monastery. (Pictured below)Furthermore, the first known poet of Spanish literature, Gonzalo de Berceo, wrote his first verses here.
We ambled back to the campsite and had some pasta for lunch. I then did a load of washing, but unfortunately, before I could get it, dried, the heavens opened, and there was a massive storm. Amidst the thunder, lightning and torrential rain. We noticed that it was the hottest day of the year so far at home, ha ha! We decided to go to the campsite bar to break the evening up and had a couple of very underwhelming tapas before returning to the van hoping for brighter weather tomorrow. 🤣 Enjoy the video!
