Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos: A Benedictine Monastery and Romanesque Heritage Site in Spain
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Spain
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Crown of Castile, Spanish
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page15 sections
History
The Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos is a Benedictine monastery in Santo Domingo de Silos, Spain, whose origins are traditionally associated with the Visigothic period and whose principal medieval buildings belong to the Romanesque period. It stands in the eastern part of the Tabladillo valley, a name first used for the valley in a document dated 954. The abbey became an important religious, artistic, and intellectual centre in Castile, and its community continues to maintain spiritual, liturgical, and cultural work.
Early monastery and decline
A foundation at the site is traditionally placed in the seventh century, although another account dates the refoundation of the monastery of San Sebastián de Silos to 929. The earliest surviving documentary reference is the charter of 954. During the tenth century, especially under Count Fernán González of Castile, who ruled from 930 to 970, the community was active and developed considerable influence.
Raids led by Almanzor, the powerful military leader and de facto ruler of the Caliphate of Córdoba in the late tenth century, brought decline. By 1002, the monastery was ruined and in decay. Its later renewal began after Domingo, a monk from Cañas in La Rioja and prior of San Millán de la Cogolla, took refuge in Castile following conflict with the king of Navarre.
The restoration under Santo Domingo
In 1041, King Fernando I of León and Castile appointed Domingo abbot and entrusted him with restoring the former prosperity of San Sebastián de Silos. Under his direction, the monastery was substantially renewed. The Romanesque church, cloister, and other monastic buildings were begun or built during his abbacy. At the height of its medieval development, 29 churches depended on the monastery, which also held extensive landed property.
Domingo died on 20 December 1073 and was canonized in 1076. The reputation of miracles associated with his tomb made the monastery a pilgrimage destination, and the community adopted him as its patron. The name Santo Domingo de Silos came into use around 1110. About 1170, the noblewoman Juana de Aza made a pilgrimage to Silos while pregnant and seeking spiritual guidance. Her son, Domingo de Guzmán, was named in honour of the monastery’s patron and later became Saint Dominic, founder of the Order of Preachers, commonly called the Dominicans.
The Romanesque church was consecrated by Abbot Fortunio in 1088, although work continued after the beginning of the twelfth century. In the eighteenth century, the Benedictine community commissioned the architect Ventura Rodríguez to replace the medieval church because a larger building was needed.
Suppression and Benedictine revival
On 17 November 1835, the monastery was closed under the exclaustration decree issued by the government of Juan Álvarez Mendizábal. Exclaustration removed religious communities from their monasteries. Benedictine life at Silos was interrupted for 45 years, while much of the library, archive, and artistic furnishing was dispersed or lost.
On 18 December 1880, expelled Benedictine monks from the French Abbey of Saint-Martin de Ligugé arrived at Silos. Led by Ildefonso Guepin, a monk of Solesmes, they re-established the monastic community and helped prevent the abbey’s complete ruin. Since the twentieth century, the monks have continued spiritual, liturgical, and cultural activities and have founded or helped establish Benedictine houses in Spain, including Nuestra Señora de Estíbaliz in Álava and San Salvador de Leyre in Navarre, as well as foundations in Mexico and Argentina.
Music, literature, and modern standing
The monks originally used Mozarabic chant, the historic liturgical tradition associated with Christian communities under Muslim rule in medieval Iberia. Around the eleventh century, they shifted toward Gregorian chant, the Latin plainchant tradition that became the principal musical repertory of the Western Catholic Church. Since the community joined the Congregation of Solesmes in 1880, the congregation’s scholarship and performance practice have strongly influenced the abbey’s liturgical music, while Mozarabic chant remains part of its practice.
The abbey also entered modern literary culture. In July 1924, the poet Gerardo Diego stayed in its guesthouse and wrote the sonnet The Cypress of Silos in the visitors’ book. The poem was later included in Versos humanos, which received Spain’s National Literature Prize in 1925. In Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, a copy of the supposed second book of Aristotle’s Poetics is said to have been taken from Santo Domingo de Silos and carried to the Italian abbey where the story takes place.
The abbey belongs to the Benedictine Order and the Congregation of Solesmes and is associated with the Archdiocese of Burgos. It was declared a historic-artistic monument and part of Spain’s National Artistic Treasury on 3 June 1931. It is also protected as a monument under Spain’s cultural-heritage system, with registration R.I.-51-0000467.
Remains
The surviving complex combines a major Romanesque cloister with an eighteenth-century church and later monastic spaces. The cloister is organized around an open courtyard, while the church preserves limited remains of its Romanesque predecessor. The monastery also retains a pharmacy, museum collections, and library holdings that illuminate its religious, artistic, medical, and intellectual history.
Romanesque cloister
The two-storey cloister is the principal surviving Romanesque feature and is regarded as a major work of Spanish Romanesque art. Its slightly irregular quadrilateral measures approximately 30 metres on two sides and 33.12 metres on the others. The lower storey is the older and artistically more important level. Its arcades rest on a continuous podium open toward the inner garden.
Lower galleries and sculpture
The north and south galleries each contain 16 semicircular arches, while the east and west galleries contain 14. Because the galleries are unequal in length, the openings vary from 1.00 to 1.15 metres. The arches rest on capitals supported by paired single-stone shafts 1.15 metres high. Central supports generally use groups of five shafts, although one northern support consists of four twisted shafts.
The lower cloister was built in two principal phases. The north and east galleries belong generally to a late eleventh-century phase, while the south and west galleries belong to a later phase in the twelfth century. The earlier columns are more widely spaced and have stronger entasis, a slight swelling in the shaft intended to prevent it from appearing concave. Their shallow carvings contain relatively static figures. The later workshop produced larger, more realistically modelled forms. The west gallery was later extended by one arch when the church was enlarged, shifting its former central axis away from the present centre.
The 64 lower-storey capitals have varied decoration, including biblical and Gospel scenes, foliage, lattices, and other vegetal or abstract patterns. They also show real and imaginary creatures such as griffins, lions, harpies, centaurs, and fabulous birds. The upper-storey capitals, made later in the twelfth century, include a greater number of narrative scenes.
Corner-pier reliefs
Large reliefs cover the inner faces of the four massive corner piers. The southeast corner represents the Ascension and Pentecost. The northeast shows the Entombment and the Descent from the Cross. The northwest depicts the disciples at Emmaus and Doubting Thomas, while the southwest presents the Annunciation and the Tree of Jesse, the Christian image of Christ’s descent from Jesse, the father of King David.
Different sculptors or workshops are associated with the reliefs. The first master, linked to the eleventh century and possibly to the period around 1085 to 1100, produced work compared with Byzantine art and ivory carving. The second master is assigned to the twelfth century. The Annunciation and Coronation of Mary have features associated with Santiago de Compostela, including abundant folds of drapery and spiral-curled hair. The Tree of Jesse has particular iconographic importance because of its relationship to the Tree of Jesse window at Saint-Denis and to a comparable motif at Santiago de Compostela. The reliefs were originally painted in bright colours and, together with the capitals, are outstanding examples of Romanesque sculpture, although individual attributions and workshop relationships remain debated.
Saint Domingo’s tomb and surviving church elements
In the north gallery stands the commemorative tomb associated with Santo Domingo de Silos. His first burial place was an anthropomorphic tomb there, and his remains were transferred to the church three years after his death. The original burial place continued to be venerated. The later tomb cover, dating from the early thirteenth century, rests on three lions and bears a pontifical effigy of the saint.
The Puerta de las Vírgenes connects the cloister with the church and is one of the principal surviving remains of the original Romanesque building. The cloister also preserves the façade of the demolished chapter house, the room where the monastic community met for official business and readings. A free-standing Romanesque Madonna and Child is also preserved within the cloister.
Mudéjar ceiling and courtyard
The cloister has a Mudéjar coffered wooden ceiling, a richly patterned form of Christian Iberian workmanship influenced by Islamic craftsmanship. It carries nearly 700 figures and scenes from Castile and is generally dated to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The ceiling was made after a fire in 1384. Financial difficulties in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helped spare the cloister from demolition and replacement.
A large cypress grows in the southwest corner of the cloister courtyard. More than 130 years old and over 30 metres high, it is regarded as a symbol of eternity and transcendence and has become an emblem of the monastery.
Eighteenth-century church
The present church replaced the Romanesque building. Designed by Ventura Rodríguez, it has a Greek-cross plan inscribed within a square. Construction began in 1751, and the church opened on 8 September 1792. The original plans included a dome, a crossing lantern, and a north tower, but financial difficulties led to their removal from the completed project. Only the south arm of the Romanesque transept, the part of a church crossing the main nave, and the Puerta de las Vírgenes survive from the earlier church.
A major fire destroyed the monks’ residential area in 1970. Restoration in 1971 and 1972 rebuilt the damaged part and produced much of the form of the monastery visible today.
Monastery pharmacy
The monastery pharmacy was founded in 1705 because the village pharmacy was not functioning adequately. It included a botanical garden, an iatrochemical laboratory for preparing medicines through chemical processes, and a specialist library. Friar Gregorio de Hoyos was its first director, followed by Friar Isidoro de Saracha, a scholar of Spanish flora who added many species to the garden.
The pharmacy operated through igualas, arrangements under which payment could be made in a specified quantity of grain, including by annual settlement. Villagers brought a prescription signed by a doctor, and the pharmacist prepared the medicine immediately. In the nineteenth century, the pharmacy passed to the lay pharmacist Francisco Palomero, who moved it to a house outside the monastery. After his death, an entrepreneur from Bilbao purchased its contents and returned them to the abbey.
The pharmacy had two rooms. One was the iatrochemical laboratory for preparing ointments and potions; the other combined a library with storage for medicine containers and botanical works. Several hundred earthenware pharmaceutical vessels and approximately 400 pharmaceutical books dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century survive.
Museum and surviving collections
The museum occupies a medieval room and contains principal pieces that survived the nineteenth-century confiscations. Its holdings include Mozarabic and Romanesque sculptures, paintings, goldsmiths’ work, documents concerning monastic life, and other objects associated with the abbey. The collection also preserves the tympanum from a door of the demolished Romanesque church.
Scriptorium and library
From the tenth century until the emergence of printing, the monastery maintained a scriptorium, a workshop where manuscripts were copied, illuminated, and prepared for preservation, together with an archive. After printed books appeared in the fifteenth century, the community maintained a separate library. A catalogue lists 4,962 books in the library in 1810, with another 80 on loan.
From the seventeenth through the nineteenth century, the library occupied the first and second floors of the eastern range. After the community returned in 1880, books were placed in the former pharmacy area on the ground floor of the western range, later moved to its upper floor, and gradually extended into the northern range across three levels. The present collection contains roughly 190,000 volumes.
The holdings include the Missal of Silos, dated 1151 and described as the oldest surviving European book on paper. A major illuminated Beatus manuscript, an illustrated medieval copy or commentary on the Apocalypse associated with Beatus of Liébana, was produced in the Silos scriptorium in stages between 1091 and 1109. It is now in the British Library, which also holds other manuscripts and a map of the Mediterranean associated with the scriptorium. The former liturgical manuscript collection included important Mozarabic material, much of which was auctioned in 1878.
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