Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos
Monasterio de Santo Domingo de Silos
Interesting facts
- Saint Dominic, founder of the Dominican order, was named after Dominic of Silos: his pregnant mother made a pilgrimage here around 1170.
- The cypress in the cloister garth is more than 130 years old and over 30 metres tall.
- In July 1924 the poet Gerardo Diego wrote his famous sonnet on the cypress of Silos in the abbey's guest book after a night at its guesthouse.
- In Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, the copy of Aristotle's lost second book of the Poetics is said to have come from Silos.
- A painted Mudéjar wooden ceiling over one cloister walk carries around 700 figures and scenes of life in 14th- and 15th-century Castile.
- The cloister's sides are slightly unequal, 30 to 33.12 metres, so the arches vary in span between 1.00 and 1.15 metres.
- The carved scenes on the corner piers were originally painted in bright colours, and their sculptor is thought to have also worked at Moissac in France.
- The monks' pharmacy charged villagers through a yearly fee paid in grain rather than per prescription.
- The library dispersed in 1835 has been rebuilt since 1880 and now holds about 190,000 volumes.
- The choir is one of the few in the world to have recorded the old Mozarabic chant, on a 1970 album for the Archiv Produktion label.
Why it is worth it
The cloister of Santo Domingo de Silos is one of the high points of Romanesque sculpture in Europe: a two-storey square of arcades on paired, sometimes twisted columns, crowned by 64 carved capitals in the lower gallery alone. Dragons, centaurs, sirens and interlaced foliage share the stone with biblical scenes, and the corner piers carry large reliefs of the events after the Passion — the Entombment, the road to Emmaus, Thomas touching the wound, the Ascension and Pentecost — alongside an Annunciation and a Tree of Jesse cut by a later hand. The north and south walks each have sixteen round arches, the east and west fourteen, and a tall cypress rises from the garden at the centre.
The abbey stands in the small village of Santo Domingo de Silos in the south of the province of Burgos. A religious house existed here in Visigothic times, and by the 10th century it was known as San Sebastián de Silos. Its revival came under Dominic, who restored it in the reign of King Ferdinand I, rebuilt the community and died in 1073; the monastery has carried his name ever since. Work on the lower cloister began in the late 11th century — a dedication is recorded for 29 September 1088 — and the upper storey followed in the 12th. The abbey church is later and of a different spirit: the Romanesque building was pulled down in 1751 and replaced by a neoclassical church designed by Ventura Rodríguez, consecrated in 1792.
Silos was also a centre of learning. Its scriptorium and library kept manuscripts of the old Mozarabic liturgy, among them the Missal of Silos, regarded as the oldest surviving Western manuscript on paper; the illuminated Silos Beatus, finished in 1109, is now in the British Library. The monastery has a historic pharmacy with its own library. The community was dissolved in 1835 and refounded in 1880 by Benedictines from the French congregation of Solesmes. Their Gregorian chant reached an unexpected audience in 1994, when the album "Chant" climbed to number three on the Billboard 200.
Getting there
The abbey is in the village of Santo Domingo de Silos, Burgos province. The nearest larger town is Aranda de Duero, about 39 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport is Vitoria Airport (VIT), roughly 117 km to the north-east.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Santo Domingo de Silos Abbey is a Benedictine monastery in the village of Santo Domingo de Silos in the southern part of Burgos Province in northern Spain. The monastery is named after the eleventh-century saint Dominic of Silos.
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