Stories from The Liébana

There are those who still remember, in the shadow of the main gallery that extends along the entire length of these ancient arcades of Potes, that strange visit by a sophisticated North American delegation, which, without being, in any way, the modern version immortalized by Luis García Berlanga in his unforgettable film ‘Welcome, Mr. Marshall’, intended to unravel part of some immemorial secrets, whose reason or unreason, since everything is possible in this strange world, time buried in the marginal Marian graves of collective memory.

Difficult, then, to penetrate the slime of these unfathomable depths, which perhaps once existed, but far from this dream place, the Americans, belonging, with all their pomp and circumstance, to a society of which the famous author of 'Return to the Stars', among other great bestsellers, the Swiss Erich von D?niken, is also a member, were terribly disappointed when the monks of the neighbouring monastery of Santo Toribio -indeed, we are in the heart of Liébana- flatly refused to let them explore the subsoil with a battery of devices as sophisticated, apparently, as those that characterise those precursors of the Star Trek series, which, metaphorically and comparatively speaking, one could think of as NASA.

What were Uncle Sam's elegant 'men in black' looking for with their sophisticated equipment in the heart of the Picos de Europa, you might ask. And here, precisely, is where we enter through the big door into the slippery territories of Science-Fiction, because, to the ears of those modern Mr. Marshall had reached the news that here could be found hidden, for centuries, that relic of the famous Temple of Solomon, reproduced in the famous Roman Arch of Titus, mysteriously disappeared from that no less metaphorical Bermuda Triangle, which is sometimes History and coveted by all: the Ark of the Covenant.

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