The Key to the Invisible Doors
From that ancient Soria, whose Twelve Lineages united to protect the infant Alfonso VIII and later accompanied him to the nearby church of Santo Domingo to celebrate his betrothal to Princess Eleanor of Aquitaine, there are still memorable places worth discovering. One of them, precisely, is found by the traveler a few hundred meters before reaching that same Monastery of San Juan and those same banks of the Duero River, which exerted such a strong influence on the fevered imagination of the poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. It is the Romanesque cloister of a co-cathedral, that of San Pedro, whose story, more or less preserved amidst the turbulence of the centuries, still exerts its fascinating original power on the astonished eyes of tourists, travelers, and pilgrims. In that plot of land, whose backdrop is assaulted by architecture of all types and eras, assembled like the layers of dust and earth that covered Homer's original Troy, ancient constraints assault the imaginat...
