Soria and the enchanted banks of the Duero

It is not difficult to imagine why this place forever captured the hearts of important writers and poets, such as Antonio Machado, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Gerardo Diego: because of its peculiar charm. But it is not a metaphorical charm, one of those that, arising spontaneously in a moment of subjective lucidity, evaporate instantly like a fragile soap bubble.

Its metaphysics goes much further and is extremely old: at least, it dates back to that time when the warlike Celtiberian people danced to the sound of drums on the magical nights of San Juan, there, where two emblematic and sacred mountains come together: that of Saint Anne and that of the Souls.

After the Celtiberians, when the fires that devastated the proud city of Numancia had been extinguished centuries ago and in the midst of the collapse of the Visigoths, strange hermit saints, like Saturio, settled again in the old schools of the world: the caves.

In this case, in those located in that precise place, which, in contemporary times, the poet Antonio Machado dreamily described as the point where the Duero River traces its crossbow curve on its melancholic path towards the lands of Zamora and Portugal and its definitive release in the orgiastic nirvana that are the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Military orders also arrived, such as that of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem and that of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, at the same time that the nobility was constituted, like the twelve astrological signs of the Zodiac, in the Twelve Lineages, around whose shield practically all the medieval history of the city revolves, while King Alfonso VIII married Princess Leonor Plantagenet in that jewel of Romanesque architecture, built by master masons of Aquitanian origin, which is the church of Santo Domingo.

And on the mirror that are the waters of the Duero, when it is not that same moon that enchanted Bécquer, it is the clouds that are reflected, like souls in torment, irremediably subject to the chains of their shroud, while in the old poplars and cottonwoods of the riverbank, the numbers engraved on their bark continue to be dates and the initials, names of lovers.

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