Hermitage of San Pedro de Echano: A Romanesque Rural Church in Navarre
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.7
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval
- Civilizations
- Kingdom of Navarre
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Church
On this page16 sections
History
The Hermitage of San Pedro de Echano is a Catholic rural church in Spain, built in the Romanesque period between about 1150 and 1160. It stands in the depopulated settlement of Echano within Olóriz, Navarre, and belongs to the Diocese of Pamplona and Tudela. Dedicated to Saint Peter under the title San Pedro ad Vincula, or “Saint Peter in Chains,” the church already shows Cistercian influence, reflecting the austere architectural tendencies associated with that medieval monastic order.
Foundation and uncertain original role
The church’s foundation is dated to around 1150, but its precise original status remains uncertain. It has been proposed as a monastery church, village parish church, abbey church, or chapel connected with the Knights Templar. These interpretations are conjectural. A more probable explanation identifies it as a private chapel associated with a noble family or palace.
The unusual decoration of the main portal may have been connected with that private setting. The patron or commissioner is unidentified, although the central figure in the portal sculpture could represent the person who ordered the work or the lord of the palace. The imagery has also been interpreted as a representation of the Roman festival of the Kalendae Januariae, presided over by a figure associated with Janus, the Roman god of beginnings, transitions, and thresholds.
The settlement of Echano
Earlier references to Echano generally concern the settlement north of the church. In 1264, King Theobald II of Navarre granted many settlements in Valdorba exemption from penalties for involuntary homicide. In 1373, the juror of Echano supplied six cahices of barley for the queen’s horses through an arrangement involving Jehan de Neuffons, a squire of the queen.
A fourteenth-century register of hearths lists eight households at the medieval settlement. By 1534, Echano was described as depopulated. Legal concessions and tax payments connected with the area appear in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century records, while the palace is first mentioned in a document from June 1550. These references help place the church within a changing rural landscape, although they do not resolve its original institutional purpose.
Later use and protection
A confraternity of San Pedro de Echano is recorded by 1627. A twentieth-century interpretation continued to describe the building as a former monastery, but its original role remains unresolved. The church is no longer used for worship. It was declared a Spanish Cultural-Interest Monument on 26 July 1993 under Navarra’s regional decree of that year.
The settlement’s official name became Etxano on 15 July 1994. The altarpiece made for San Pedro de Echano was transferred to the Church of San Pedro in Tafalla in 1975 and later moved from Tafalla to the parish church of Sarriguren in 2009.
Remains
The Hermitage of San Pedro de Echano is an isolated rural Romanesque building in a small hollow on the slopes of the Alaiz range. The depopulated settlement lies approximately 250 to 300 metres to the north, uphill among oak trees. The church follows a traditional eastward orientation and measures more than 22 metres in length and about 7 metres in width. Its single nave terminates in a semicircular apse.
Layout and construction
Nave and apse
The apse is covered by a half-dome vault, while the nave is divided into three rectangular bays with a pointed barrel vault carried by transverse arches. These arches rest on columns with carved capitals. Most of the capitals display vegetal designs, including fleshy leaves arranged in two tiers. The capital on the Gospel side of the triumphal arch shows confronting lions, while capitals in the bay nearest the entrance contain narrative scenes. A chequered impost, a projecting horizontal band, runs around the nave.
The church was apparently planned to receive a dome like those found in other churches of Valdorba, although the available evidence does not establish that the dome was completed. This planned arrangement has prompted comparisons with the castle church of Loarre and with the churches of Catalain, Olleta, and Orisoain. The walls are built of carefully squared ashlar blocks of relatively uniform size. Their thickness reaches about 1.20 metres at the west gable and up to 1.80 metres at the apse.
Exterior fabric and building traces
Sturdy buttresses reinforce the exterior, which also includes an elegant bell gable. Numerous putlog holes remain in the masonry. These openings held the ends of scaffolding timbers during construction. Traces on the inner west gable and on some corbels show that the church was painted both inside and outside.
Windows and bell gable
Three splayed windows illuminate the apse. Their interiors are plain, while their exteriors have double archivolts, or decorated bands following the curve of an arch. The outer archivolt is ornamented with balls, and the windows also have chequered imposts and small columns with vegetal capitals. These columns are finely drilled or undercut. A further undecorated semicircular window appears on the Epistle side, the side traditionally associated with the reading of the epistle during the liturgy.
The west gable contains a large semicircular opening that splays inward and remains plain on the exterior. The three-opening bell gable may incorporate materials recovered from the palace after its collapse. On the south side, a small semicircular portal has a plain tympanum, the surface enclosed by the arch. Its simple treatment, together with the undecorated southern window and plain roof-supporting corbels, has been interpreted as evidence that palace-related buildings once stood against that side of the church.
The sculpted north portal
Portal structure and arch decoration
The principal entrance occupies the final bay on the north side. It projects from the wall in a structure about 1.5 metres deep, more than 6 metres wide, and almost 5 metres high. A projecting canopy rests on ten corbels and shelters six richly decorated archivolts, followed by a seventh moulded archivolt that served as a rain guard. The six principal arches alternate between a richly carved impost and three engaged columns on each side, set between pilasters.
The tympanum is empty and is thought to have originally contained a lost Christogram, a monogram representing the name of Christ. The northward position of the entrance has been explained by the former palace-related dependencies on the south side. The portal’s central archivolt and lateral capitals carry imagery that differs from the Christian symbols and motifs commonly used on contemporary European church portals.
Festival imagery and the central figure
One wedge-shaped stone, or voussoir, in the fourth archivolt depicts a two-headed figure identified as Janus. The sculptural ensemble also includes a mask and twenty-three seated figures arranged before a table formed by the curved moulding of the archivolt. The central keystone shows a bearded man with outward-curling locks, his hands resting on his knees as he presides over the gathering.
The man may represent the commissioner of the church or the lord of the palace. The mask and the two-headed personification of Janus appear beside him, while the other figures wear cloaks, tunics, or padded garments associated with men-at-arms. Four musicians participate in the gathering. Two are shown with wooden legs, and the instruments include horns, an albogue, and a panpipe or syrinx. Other figures play wooden clappers, raise their hands in gestures associated with singing, or place their hands on the table as if keeping musical time. Their varied beards and hairstyles support an interpretation of the scene as festive or carnivalesque.
Capitals and figures of homage
The portal capitals include two vegetal examples, one bearing two confronting birds, and three historiated capitals with narrative scenes. In one, two elegantly dressed nobles hold large palms while waiting to receive someone. Another shows a seated travelling figure, whose damaged head may once have represented the figure in the keystone, attended by two knights.
The final scene may show the patron receiving homage. One kneeling figure appears to offer an object, possibly bread and salt, while another kneels nearby. The figures wear cloaks or pellizones, short tunics with narrow sleeves and decorative borders. Sculptors associated with the workshop of Master Esteban worked on the portal and the interior capitals.
Corbel sculpture
Main roof eaves
Thirty-seven corbels, projecting stones supporting the roof eaves, form a broad sculptural program around the main roof. Corbels 1 to 15 carry celestial or positive numerical symbolism. Numbers 16 to 21 present playful or profane subjects, including a drinker with a barrel, a minstrel, a contortionist, an exhibitionist woman, and an ithyphallic man. Numbers 22 to 37 combine symbolic images with foliage decoration. The corbels beneath the nave roof are attributed to the workshop of Leodegarius.
Portal canopy
The ten corbels beneath the portal canopy form a separate series of portraits and symbolic scenes. Their number has been connected in the interpretation with the total of thirty-seven main eave corbels and with the Pythagorean tetractys, a triangular arrangement of the first four numbers whose total is ten.
The profane imagery of the portal and the extensive decoration of the corbels give San Pedro de Echano an unusual place within rural Romanesque architecture and European Romanesque art.
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