Legends of Becquer

Gustavo Adolfo Becquer (1836-1870) knew the city of Soria and the Campo de Gómara and Moncayo well for having spent some seasons in them.

In the legend “The mont of Souls” told in 1861 that the Templars and the nobles died in a confrontation with the hunting that had the Temple on Mount de las Animas, where the scene is repeated with its ghostly skeletons in the night of all the deceased, as they could see Alonso and Beatriz tragically. The legend is recreated in the celebration Night of the Dead “from the Plaza del Rincon de Becquer to the Duero River. You can also know this legend in the audiovisual Becquerian the House of Poets.

And so concludes the legend: “They say that after befallen this event, a stray hunter who spent the night of the dead unable to leave the Mount of souls, and that the day before he died, he could tell what he saw, he said horrible things. Among others, he said he saw the skeletons of the ancient Templars and the nobles of Soria buried in the atrium of the chapel up to the point of prayer with a horrible crash, and gentlemen on the bones of horses, chasing her like a beast a beautiful, pale and disheveled woman with bare and bloody feet, and throwing cries of horror, circled around the tomb of Alonso. ”

In “The Moonbeam”, 1862, Becquer resorts to the east bank of the Duero, from the convent of San Juan, which qualifies as Templar to the place of San Saturio, to place the summer night search by Manrique a mysterious “white Lady” that has fallen in love, until half crazy to finally see that the white figure he had seen among the foliage of the mall was not a woman but a moonbeam. In this story Becquer includes various thematic topics of literary Romanticism with his poetry of dreams or imagination in describing the Manrique psychology (loner, introverted, romantic and imaginative) and nature (Duero, trees, gardens, rocks ..). Disillusioned, Manrique spend the next depressive years without anything to comfort him: “No! No !, I want nothing …, that is, yes I want … I want you to leave me alone …. Cantigas …. women … glory … happiness … lies all in vain that we are ghosts in our imagination and dress at will, and love them and run after them, why ?, to find a moonbeam. “