Monsalud Monastery: Cistercians and Templars in Alcarria

Still consolidations, which, in no way recovered in all the glorious extension that they had in the past, the ruins of the old Cistercian monastery of Monsalud, miraculously escaped from the financial clutches of the great North American magnates, whose dark and snobbish commercial strategies, devastated other singular heritage assets of the Alcarria, still attract the attention of the curious, the mystery hunter and the romantic, who see, in the complexity of its diminished symmetry, indications of a fervent past, where Architecture, understood as the language of God, strengthened ties with harmony and perfection. Young was, by the way, that Camilo José Cela, who, with a backpack on his shoulder and half-league boots, like the famous Perrault cat, launched himself with glorious determination onto the dusty roads, uncovering, who knows, whether by chance or by chance, the ancient traditions of this land of ancient secrets, the Alcarria, which persisted in seeing in them, a place from which the Templars looked with greedy expectation, the neighboring lands of Cuenca.

Located within the municipal area of Córcoles, not far, either, from a swamp, that of Sacedón, whose waters, imitating the chameleon, are transmuted into the serene blue of skies that resemble the same ones that Michelangelo painted as frames in his Chapel Sistine, there were even times in which the magnificent resonance box of these disentailed medieval walls, changed the depth of Gregorian chant, for the roar of modern rock concerts and even, in more recent times, for the solemn ceremonies of consecration with which modern neo-Templar entities receive and clothe their new members. But, when both of them move away, in silence and solitude, barely broken by the melancholic hoot of the owl, whose nyctalope eyes peer around in search of the treacherous mouse, the old mysteries become strong again, at the same time light of those same stars, which, an eternity of centuries ago, attended his splendid consecration.

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