The Priory of San Frutos and the Hoces of Duraton’s river

Without a doubt, Segovia is a community of contrasts; a singular land, where Art, History, Tradition, Nature, Mystery and Legend, form, agglutinated or separately, one of the most brilliant cultural ensembles of this, our arcana Hesperia. Of the Villa and Tierra de Sepulveda -whose Fuero is still preserved as a real treasure, in the crypt of the church of Santos Justo y Pastor, nowadays, converted into a Museum of Sacred Art and Information Office-, there are many places to visit - inside or outside its walls - and to talk about; but of all of them they emphasize, not only for proximity but also for their singularity, for their legendary solitude and for their extreme beauty, the Sickles of the Duratón River. It would be unforgivable to make a visit, more or less prolonged to Sepúlveda, and not to begin, even by way of introduction, spoken of such a paradigmatic place.

It is there, approximately in the middle of the sickles, where they form not one, but several crossbow bows -as the poet would say, referring to the Duero as it passes through another sister community, such as the Soriana-, keeping the walls of its cliffs by formidable colonies of birds of prey - leonados, most of them - where a memorable ruin rises that, however, every October 25, attracts en masse neighbors of the surrounding villages and visitors from other communities, in a pilgrimage which remains in force since time immemorial: the Priory of San Frutos.

Its history, although it does not differ too much from the orthodox history of practically all the national monasteries since its foundation -generally from the eleventh century- until the famous Disentailment of Mendizábal, maintains, nevertheless, the temporal magic of its enigmatics origins and of the first inhabitants who, searching for God -although, in reality, fleeing from a world that struggled among the death throes of an invasion that put an end to an ancient world, the Visigoth, to submit to the designs of a The new world, the Muslim, retreated to this well-known Desert of the Duratón, being the precursors of the future monastic communities, as it happened in many other places of the conquered Hispania.

The most famous of those who occupied the concavities of the earth in this fabulous place, was San Frutos. A character, whose life is debated on the back of history and legend and who, already in his name, offers some concomitance with the ancient cults of fertility, in a place where they could very well have been applied by the communities celtíberas that dwelt in their places centuries before.

The ruins of the Priorat of San Frutos, as well as the ruins of the nearby monastery of Our Lady of the Angels, are silent witnesses of a mysterious and lost history. A story that sleeps his eternal dream, far from the mundane banality of a world that occasionally wants to penetrate it and contemplates it with nostalgic commiseration.

Going into these romantic ruins, then, can be more than an adventure: a fascinating reverie. Reaching and peeping from those open windows into the infinite light of the stars, can, at the same time, be an exercise in regression to the past; an interactive personal story, where each one has to look for the keys of enigmas that, still asleep, are still there, demanding an attention and an understanding, that they only have to arrive, letting themselves go; becoming a voluntary hostage of an environment that, despite the apparent, still has a lot of life and, of course, many things to tell.

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NOTICE: published for the first time in my blog MEMORIES OF A PILGRIM. Both the text, as the photographs, and the video (except music, reproduced under a YouTube license), are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry can be found at the following address: https://jcarlos347.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/el-priorato-de-san-frutos.html

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