Machado's Soria: from the Plaza Mayor to the Duero: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
Machado's Soria and San Juan de Duero
Machado came to Soria in 1907 to teach French, married Leonor here in 1909 and lost her in 1912; the walk passes the church where they married, the museum of the poets, the institute where he taught, and the Romanesque churches, bridge and monasteries of the town he wrote about, down to the Duero.
The stops
Soria's main square is the head of Calle del Collado, one of the town's busiest shopping streets. The town hall, the Palacio de los Doce Linajes, which the council made its seat around 1897, bears a round shield split into twelve parts, one for each of the noble houses that repopulated Soria in the twelfth century. The old town hall that became the Audiencia, remodelled in 1769, still has the clock that Antonio Machado knew and sang of in one of his poems.
Photo: Luis Rogelio HM — CC BY-SA 2.0 Antonio Machado married Leonor Izquierdo here on 30 July 1909; she had turned fifteen a month before and he was thirty-four. She died of tuberculosis three years later, and a 2012 bronze of her by Ricardo González Gil, dressed in the fashion of her time, stands beside the Romanesque south doorway. Hidden behind houses for over a century, the church's late-Gothic apse came to light in 2006.
Photo: Dgarcia29 — CC BY-SA 3.0 This Romanesque church of the late twelfth century has a richly sculpted west portal that was not made for it: it came from the church of San Nicolás in 1908, in a restoration that also took the whitewash off the interior and uncovered the Romanesque decoration. The apse is unusual too, with a pilaster rather than a window on its central axis. On the high altar, a Romanesque crucifix known as the Cristo del Olvido was brought from the old monastery church of San Polo.
Photo: Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 3.0 On the third floor of the old Casino, this museum opened on 2 April 2012 and is given to the three poets who sang of Soria: Antonio Machado, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Gerardo Diego. Machado joined the Círculo de la Amistad, one of the two societies behind the Casino, as an occasional member in December 1908, and when he first arrived in Soria in 1907 he lodged on this same street, at number 54.
Photo: Emilio J. Rodríguez Posada — CC BY-SA 4.0 Built in the late twelfth century over an older church of San Tomé, Santo Domingo has a west front counted among the great achievements of Spanish Romanesque. Two tiers of blind arcades frame the doorway and the rose window above it, and the doorway's arches carry the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse playing instruments. In the tympanum God the Father holds Christ seated on him, one of only five known examples of that image in the world, all in Spain.
Photo: Arnaldo Mira Pérez — CC BY-SA 4.0 Antonio Machado began teaching French here in the 1907 to 1908 school year, aged thirty-two, to pupils of thirteen to fifteen. The Baroque building was the Jesuits' college, rebuilt after a fire in 1740; it became the provincial secondary school in 1840 and took the poet's name in 1967. A head of Machado by the sculptor Pablo Serrano, set up in 1982, stands by the entrance.
Photo: Dgarcia29 — CC BY-SA 3.0 The most representative Renaissance civil building in Soria was raised by Francisco López de Río y Salcedo, and the inscription on its facade dates the main work to 1592. Its 109-metre front ends in a three-storey tower; the right-hand section has a gallery of twelve wide arches with 24 smaller windows on the floor above, and lion heads on the cornice spout the rainwater. The family became counts of Gómara in 1692 under Charles II, and the palace now houses the provincial court.
Photo: Franciscojhh — CC BY-SA 4.0 Only the apse and parts of the side walls remain of this Romanesque church, protected as a cultural asset since 1962; the nave roof came down in 1858. The church is named in the 1270 census ordered by Alfonso X, and the noble lineage of the Salvadores Honderos met in its porch. Its portal was moved in 1908 to San Juan de Rabanera, and in 1978 restorers found frescoes of the murder of Saint Thomas of Canterbury on one of the surviving walls.
Photo: José Luis Filpo Cabana — CC BY 3.0 San Pedro has been a co-cathedral, sharing its seat with El Burgo de Osma, only since 1959; before that it was a collegiate church. Its treasure is the Romanesque cloister: the west gallery was begun in the middle of the twelfth century and, going by a funerary inscription in the east wall, the whole was finished by 1205. The cloister became a national monument in 1929, and the church beside it was rebuilt in the sixteenth century after the Romanesque one fell.
Photo: Pedro J Pacheco — CC BY-SA 4.0 This bridge is the city's main way in from the east, and a royal privilege of 1157 already names the great bridge of Soria. It has eight round arches, the central one the widest, and in the Middle Ages it carried two gate towers where a toll was collected; the one in the middle was pulled down in 1851. When Alfonso X stayed in Soria in March 1256, Blas Taracena writes, the Hospitallers had recently settled in the suburb by the bridge and the Templars at San Polo.
Photo: Dgarcia29 — CC BY-SA 3.0 The Knights Hospitaller raised this monastery in the first half of the twelfth century on the bank of the Duero, and it stayed inhabited until the eighteenth century; church and cloister are now its ruins and the medieval section of the Numantine Museum. The thirteenth-century cloister has 44 arches, and each of its four corners is different, some with arches that cross one another. In the church, two small domed canopies stand either side of the sanctuary like an iconostasis, so that the priest could be hidden at the consecration, following the Greek rite.
Photo: D.Rovchak — CC BY-SA 4.0 On the left bank of the Duero, among orchards, stands what is left of a monastery traditionally attributed to the Templars, though no document confirms it. The church is thirteenth-century Romanesque and Gothic, and a road runs through its nave by two facing doors joined by a vaulted passage. It was no longer used for worship by the eighteenth century and is now a private home; Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer set his legend El rayo de luna among its walls and orchards.
Photo: Luis Rogelio HM — CC BY-SA 2.0 San Saturio, the patron saint of Soria, is said to have lived as a hermit in the cave under this chapel, and the story goes that he watched a young man named Prudencio swim the Duero without wetting his clothes, and the young man then asked to stay with him. The present church, finished in 1703 to designs by Pedro de Ajín, hangs on the rock above the river and is an elongated octagon inside. Antonio Machado names the hermitage in his poem Campos de Soria, which also places the golden poplars of the river road between San Polo and San Saturio.
Photo: Coralma* — CC0
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