Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas

On the western edge of Burgos stands a convent that for centuries was as much a royal institution as a religious one. Las Huelgas was founded in 1187 by King Alfonso VIII of Castile and his English queen, Eleanor, daughter of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as a house of Cistercian nuns and a burial place for the Castilian crown. The odd name refers to the open, fallow land on which it was built, not to anything to do with rest or strikes. Its abbesses ruled dozens of villages with a near-princely authority that held until the reforms of the Council of Trent, and princesses of the royal family lived within its walls.

The buildings preserve layers from several worlds. The oldest core, a small late-Romanesque cloister known as Las Claustrillas, holds chapels decorated by craftsmen trained in the Islamic tradition: the Chapel of the Assumption, with horseshoe arches and intricate carved plaster, is one of the finest examples of Almohad-style art on Christian soil. The great church, raised in the first half of the 13th century, is a Cistercian Gothic building with three naves and a broad east end, its nave screened off as the nuns' choir and lined with royal tombs, including those of the founders. The larger cloister of San Fernando keeps fragments of painted Mudéjar plasterwork with heraldic and animal motifs.

The tombs gave the abbey another treasure. When they were opened for study in the 1940s, they yielded garments, cushions and shrouds of silk and gold thread, now shown in a museum of medieval fabrics that is considered among the richest of its kind in the world. The abbey also keeps a large woven banner that tradition holds was taken from the Almohad caliph at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The convent also keeps the Codex Las Huelgas, a 14th-century music manuscript of chant and early polyphony, some of it surviving nowhere else. Local tradition holds that a 13th-century statue of Saint James with a movable arm, in a chapel off the old cloister, was used to dub kings as knights.

Burgos, once the capital of the Kingdom of Castile, grew rich on the wool trade and the pilgrim road to Santiago; its Gothic cathedral is a World Heritage Site, and Las Huelgas lies within walking distance of the old town.

Getting there

The abbey is about 1.5 km west of central Burgos. Burgos Rosa Manzano station has direct high-speed and long-distance trains to Madrid and northern Spain. Santander Airport (SDR) is about 120 km to the north across the Cantabrian mountains, reached by motorway.