Amulets Needed, Just in Case
Spain is an old, old land. Many peoples of many beliefs have mingled together on this same patch of earth over the past two thousand years. The gods of one people become the demons of another generation. Hallowed priests transformed into demonic witches, forcing our ancestors to be watchful of the Evil Eye. Spells and curses acquired more power than prior blessings. Legends of witches' rings and aquelarres acquired veracity and have survived to our day.
Even today in Galicia, older folk will vehemently believe meigas still inhabit our midst. Unlucky people will discover eggs buried in their garden and know that someone wishes them ill. Others might smell suspiciously of garlic, and will pull an amulet garlic clove out of their pocket along with spare change, when they go to pay their groceries,.
There are places here where witches used to gather. The bell of the church at San Salvador de Coiro, in Cangas, used to ring by itself on Saturday nights to gather the local witches. They would fly to the beach of Areas Gordas to dance and comply with their rituals on its sands. The most famous witch of Galicia, María Soliña, was accused one day in 1621 of attending the gathering and then casting spells on her neighbors.
Her story is typical of the use of the Inquisition to satisfy the greed of the upper castes. María Soliña was married to Pedro Barba. He and María's brother had a small fish curing company. They owned a two-story stone house in Cangas, various properties, had a small fishing boat, and the right by inheritance to have a say in the choosing of the titular of two churches as well as a right to a percentage of any benefit those parishes might generate. Records say they had children, though not how many. They were a prosperous family. But, in 1617, Turkish (some say Berber) pirates sailed into the estuary of Vigo and looted and laid waste to Cangas. Many men died defending the fishing port, including Pedro Barbas and his brother-in-law. María Soliña was now truly alone. (Soliña is also the feminine dimunitive in Galician of alone.) She started to wander down in the evenings to the beach where her menfolk had been killed. She went there to pray. But she was now a rich widow and Cangas was a devastated town whose inhabitants could no longer pay their tithes to the local lords. The lords had no intention of losing any of the income they had become accustomed to, so they turned to the Inquisition and denounced nine women, all of them widows, including María Soliña. She was seventy years old.
She was taken to the dungeons of the Inquisition in Santiago de Compostela, where she was tortured repeatedly. In the end, she confessed that she had been a witch for the past twenty years. She was condemned to wear the sambenito, a penitential garment, for six months. And all her property was confiscated. There is no record of her death, and it is to be assumed that she probably died from the wounds inflicted by the torture either shortly before sentencing or soon afterwards.
Another place supposedly cursed for having committed sacrilege is the village of Abuín, quite close by. There were stories that at the end of the 1500's, an inhabitant had participated in the looting of a monastery and had hidden a good part of the treasure thus obtained in Abuín. And then the inhabitants started dying of a strange disease. The plague had arrived in a fishing boat that had come from the stricken town of O Grove. The survivors believed it was a divine punishment, and abandoned the village. But they only went up the hill a bit, where they built new houses, and let the old ones crumble. I haven't been, yet, but the walls of some of the houses can still be seen, some of them with strange symbols carved on them, probably to keep the curse in place and not follow the survivors.
Other places in Spain have acquired a reputation only recently. One of these is La Mussara, an abandoned town in the township of Vila Plana, Tarragona. It is on a hilltop and frequently covered in fog on cloudy days. There were really no legends about this town. It quietly lost population as people moved to an easier life in larger towns, being definitively abandoned in the 1950's. The strange things happened later.
The town now consists of a ruined church and the remains of some houses. Near the stones where a large farmhouse used to be there is a large stone. It is said that those who pass over it will disappear and be taken to the "Villa de seis." There are stories of people who have disappeared for hours and then reappeared. Two of them were supposedly a young soldier doing his obligatory training and his girlfriend in 1980. They had gone together to La Mussara to be alone. The young man had to be back at his post within two hours. Two hours later, they returned. The young soldier was arrested for having gone AWOL. They had been gone for twelve hours. In 1996 a man went up to the area hunting for wild asparagus. As he wandered the paths, enveloped in fog, he kept hearing whistling behind him. After being there for two hours, the fog lifted and it was night. He was astounded when he checked his watch and found eight hours had passed. But the strangest vanishing has never been resolved. A group of friends gathered in October of 1991 and went to La Mussara to look for mushrooms. As they went looking through the fallen leaves they were all talking. All were in earshot and could see each other. Suddenly, one of them didn't respond to a question. The friends got together and went to where they had last heard him. He wasn't there, only his basket lying on the brown leaves with a mushroom in it.
The Civil Guard was contacted and a thorough search conducted. Except for the basket the friends had found, nothing was ever known about the mushroom picker again. His car was where he had left it with everything inside, including a medication he was taking. His friends continued the search after the Civil Guard desisted. One night, they were resting in the remains of a house when they heard hoof beats approaching the church. They went to see who it could be and they saw what appeared to be white shapes of men wearing tunics moving stones inside the church. The shapes disappeared within a hearbeat and their friend never appeared.
Then there is the town of Trasmoz, in the Moncayo mountains in Aragón. It's the only town in Spain that has ever been cursed and excommunicated by the Pope. Trasmoz has been known as the "town of the witches" even before being cursed in 1511. Things began broiling back in the thirteenth century, when counterfeiters made their own coins in the castle's cellars. To cover up the sounds, rumors were made to wander that there were witches up to no good somewhere under the castle. Apart from that, the lord of the town was not a vassal to the local monastery of Veruela. A royal edict had declared the town to be independent and to have rights to the water that came from Moncayo. That, and the counterfeit coins, took power and money away from the monastery. So, the abbot appealed to Rome, declaring the entire town, a tolerant mix of Jews, Moors and Christians, to be witches or working in close collaboration with them. The result was the excommunication of the entire town in 1252. But the lord did not ask for forgiveness and the legend of the town grew. In 1511 the abbot and monks of Veruela put up a crucifix just outside town, covered it in a black cloth, and cursed the town and its inhabitants.
Time and progress has done what the Church couldn't, and now Trasmoz is a slowly dying town of around seventy censored inhabitants, half of which live there year-round. Its legends have been written about by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, a Spanish Romantic writer who, in the nineteenth century, spent a time at the monastery of Veruela to treat his tuberculosis. Later, it acquired more notoriety when the Basque separatists, ETA, held Julio Iglesias' father captive for ransom in a house just outside the town in 1982. And now, every summer it holds a festival of witches. There is a medieval fair where herbal medicines are sold, the "capture" of a witch, music, and general fun to celebrate the only town ever excommunicated that remains so.
There are many other legendary places, some of which are complete hoaxes, but others where history isn't just too sure about what might be true or not. It's always fun just to wonder, "what if...."
Even today in Galicia, older folk will vehemently believe meigas still inhabit our midst. Unlucky people will discover eggs buried in their garden and know that someone wishes them ill. Others might smell suspiciously of garlic, and will pull an amulet garlic clove out of their pocket along with spare change, when they go to pay their groceries,.
Her story is typical of the use of the Inquisition to satisfy the greed of the upper castes. María Soliña was married to Pedro Barba. He and María's brother had a small fish curing company. They owned a two-story stone house in Cangas, various properties, had a small fishing boat, and the right by inheritance to have a say in the choosing of the titular of two churches as well as a right to a percentage of any benefit those parishes might generate. Records say they had children, though not how many. They were a prosperous family. But, in 1617, Turkish (some say Berber) pirates sailed into the estuary of Vigo and looted and laid waste to Cangas. Many men died defending the fishing port, including Pedro Barbas and his brother-in-law. María Soliña was now truly alone. (Soliña is also the feminine dimunitive in Galician of alone.) She started to wander down in the evenings to the beach where her menfolk had been killed. She went there to pray. But she was now a rich widow and Cangas was a devastated town whose inhabitants could no longer pay their tithes to the local lords. The lords had no intention of losing any of the income they had become accustomed to, so they turned to the Inquisition and denounced nine women, all of them widows, including María Soliña. She was seventy years old.
She was taken to the dungeons of the Inquisition in Santiago de Compostela, where she was tortured repeatedly. In the end, she confessed that she had been a witch for the past twenty years. She was condemned to wear the sambenito, a penitential garment, for six months. And all her property was confiscated. There is no record of her death, and it is to be assumed that she probably died from the wounds inflicted by the torture either shortly before sentencing or soon afterwards.
Other places in Spain have acquired a reputation only recently. One of these is La Mussara, an abandoned town in the township of Vila Plana, Tarragona. It is on a hilltop and frequently covered in fog on cloudy days. There were really no legends about this town. It quietly lost population as people moved to an easier life in larger towns, being definitively abandoned in the 1950's. The strange things happened later.
The Civil Guard was contacted and a thorough search conducted. Except for the basket the friends had found, nothing was ever known about the mushroom picker again. His car was where he had left it with everything inside, including a medication he was taking. His friends continued the search after the Civil Guard desisted. One night, they were resting in the remains of a house when they heard hoof beats approaching the church. They went to see who it could be and they saw what appeared to be white shapes of men wearing tunics moving stones inside the church. The shapes disappeared within a hearbeat and their friend never appeared.
Then there is the town of Trasmoz, in the Moncayo mountains in Aragón. It's the only town in Spain that has ever been cursed and excommunicated by the Pope. Trasmoz has been known as the "town of the witches" even before being cursed in 1511. Things began broiling back in the thirteenth century, when counterfeiters made their own coins in the castle's cellars. To cover up the sounds, rumors were made to wander that there were witches up to no good somewhere under the castle. Apart from that, the lord of the town was not a vassal to the local monastery of Veruela. A royal edict had declared the town to be independent and to have rights to the water that came from Moncayo. That, and the counterfeit coins, took power and money away from the monastery. So, the abbot appealed to Rome, declaring the entire town, a tolerant mix of Jews, Moors and Christians, to be witches or working in close collaboration with them. The result was the excommunication of the entire town in 1252. But the lord did not ask for forgiveness and the legend of the town grew. In 1511 the abbot and monks of Veruela put up a crucifix just outside town, covered it in a black cloth, and cursed the town and its inhabitants.Time and progress has done what the Church couldn't, and now Trasmoz is a slowly dying town of around seventy censored inhabitants, half of which live there year-round. Its legends have been written about by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, a Spanish Romantic writer who, in the nineteenth century, spent a time at the monastery of Veruela to treat his tuberculosis. Later, it acquired more notoriety when the Basque separatists, ETA, held Julio Iglesias' father captive for ransom in a house just outside the town in 1982. And now, every summer it holds a festival of witches. There is a medieval fair where herbal medicines are sold, the "capture" of a witch, music, and general fun to celebrate the only town ever excommunicated that remains so.
There are many other legendary places, some of which are complete hoaxes, but others where history isn't just too sure about what might be true or not. It's always fun just to wonder, "what if...."
Thanks!
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