Bocigas de Perales: a village of Soria with natural charm

We returned from an interesting excursion through Burgos, after visiting, among other places, the curious chapel of the Christ of San Sebastian, in Coruña del Conde (1) and well yantar, as it would be said in those parts, in Peñaranda de Duero. We were looking for a Romanesque church, that of San Pedro, but we also discovered - a picture is worth a thousand words - a spectacular rocky landscape.

The church of San Pedro, is still there, at the beginning of the town; in front of the modern hexagonal shaped fountain, which serves as a roundabout. It has a beautiful cover, in one of whose archivolts, the intertwined knots remind the stranger of the deep Celtiberian roots of the province.

As can be seen in the amazing rock formations on which the town sits, on the capitals and corbels of the old temple, time has also conspired, using as an executor arm of those fantastic stonemasons that are the winds, to exercise at their whim the censorship of erosion.

And yet, as in defiance of an undeserved condemnation, the prerogative of a symbolic message well known in the province is still perceived: the Arab-looking horseman, similar, in essence, to the one who, today, is barely discerning in another. of the ancestral capitals of the church of San Miguel, in the old town of San Esteban de Gormaz; the pineapples, symbol of immortality, but also reference to the union of the Christian people, and the beasts faced, common motif in the Romanesque but that, curiously, is a particularly abundant representation in those lands of Gómara, which always look in the direction of the sacrosanct Moncayo

There is a placid languor, like those verses of Verlaine that foreshadowed the Allied landing in Normandy, in those rural houses pampered by a sun that is seen in the mirror of stone and adobe, or in those silent darkness of the small caves that, wineries to ancestral use, maceran an immemorial blood broth, inheritance of that first Noah, whose memory feeds the legends of many peoples.

And further on, on that tiny island where the plain centralizes fields of labor and hard steppe, obstinate poplars see their leaves gray, waiting for the arrival of an autumn that, still reluctant to change its guard with the summer, appears with parsimonious slowness.

Notes:

(1) I say curious, because in its structure you can see many ornamental remains belonging to the ruins of the neighboring Roman city of Clunia.

NOTICE: originally posted on my blog SORIA WAY WALK WALKING. Both the text and the photographs are my exclusive intellectual property. The original entry, where you can check the authorship of juancar347, can be found at the following address: https://juancar347.blogspot.com/2011/12/bocigas-de-perales-encanto-natural.html