An architecture of the Spirit

Leaving behind that city of Berlanga and entering the parameric deserts of his ancestral town and manor, precisely there, where the bare mountains and abrupt ravines, along whose bottom some tributaries of the Duero flow with melancholic relish, such as the Escalote River, whose course, miraculously uninterrupted through the centuries, it is carving out occasional samples of a ghostly rock craft, a hermitage, with more than a thousand years old and an appearance as humble as it is disconcerting, is the evident proof that even deserts can also be seduced by the noble influence of beauty. At first glance, the eye that is easily dazzled by the babelic and superlative will naively pass by, mistakenly assuming that far from being in a building that masterfully follows the most solid canons of Sacred Geometry, it is in front of another of those old peasant ruins, which, from time to time, ravage the roads, carrying their sad message of abandonment and desolation. But the eye that looks with the spirit, allowing itself to be influenced by the experience of those same paths and above all, by the solid truths that are always hidden behind everything humble, will know, even before the door opens, that You are in front of a true treasure and although you can no longer contemplate it with the true splendor that it had in its origins, you will feel nobly participating in being in a place that, with all due merit, well deserves the qualification, in capital letters, 'of the Spirit '.

Because, really, it was conceived in the spirit of two religions, which, even theoretically irreconcilable on the bloody battlefields, demonstrated, without a doubt, that the paths of Truth are unpredictable and that, when men agree, Divinity manifests itself to everyone's taste. For this reason, it matters little or nothing if those who enter this place are Christians or Muslims, since both one and the other will find, in its interior architecture, unequivocally determinative traces of the beliefs of both and where, if the former see a church, the latter will contemplate a mosque: 'God wants it' and 'Allah is great', they will only be irrelevant phrases for those who really seek the Truth in the bottom of their hearts.

NOTICE: Both the text and the photographs that accompany it are my exclusive intellectual property and, therefore, are subject to my Copyright.