Romanesque art: A romanesque monastery. 

Past forms and ordinal numbers in Spanish.

Hello friends welcome to Spanish travel, your channel for immersion in Spanish. Today we are going to visit the Romanesque Monastery of San Juan de la Peña. 

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We are in front of one of the most important monasteries in the history of Aragon, a jewel of the Romanesque and an obligatory stop on the route of the Camino de Santiago. Now we are going to visit.

To talk about the origin of this monastery, we must go back to the s. VIII, when, due to the Muslim invasion, many Christians went to the mountains to protect themselves from the Muslims. They hid in caves where they led a religious life. And this is how the first monasteries appear.

The oldest part of the monastery dates from the s. X, and is the pre-Romanesque church of San Julián and Santa Basilisa. In it, we can see horseshoe arches and wall paintings decorating the ceilings of the vault. 

In the year 1026, the King of Navarre, Sancho III el Mayor refounds the monastery and enlarges it by building it in the Romanesque style. Thus making it a very important religious and political centre.

In this place there was the masseur and the oven, a place where the monks made bread.

Later, King Sancho Ramírez turned it into a royal pantheon. Here the first three kings of Aragon will be buried with their families.

When there is a royal pantheon, the nobles also want to be buried as close as possible to the Kings, so the pantheon of nobles was built. Here we can see the decoration of the Jaques checkered. Checkered: because it reminds us of a chessboard. And Jaqués: because we are on the way of the Jacobean Route, that is, the Camino de Santiago. 

The church that we have just visited was too small for such a large and important monastery, so it was necessary to build a new church, this time in Romanesque style.

The cloister is the most representative place of this monastery. It is a courtyard protected by a large rock. This is the place where the monks walked and prayed. If we look at the capitals of the columns we will see that they are decorated with scenes from the Bible.

In 1675, after a great 3-day fire, it was decided to build the new monastery located on the rock in the San Indalecio meadow.

To go to the new monastery we are going to walk the same path that the monks used.

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Ordinal numbers in Spanish

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