Royal Monastery of San Juan de la Peña

San Juan de la Peña is a monastery built beneath a cliff: an enormous overhang of rock forms the roof over its Romanesque cloister, so that the carved arcades stand in permanent shade with the mountain hanging directly above them. The name means Saint John of the Rock. The old monastery lies in the Aragonese Pyrenees southwest of Jaca, and in the Middle Ages it was the most important religious house in Aragon.

Local legend tells of a young nobleman named Voto who, chasing a deer on horseback, plunged over the edge of the cliff and landed unharmed at its foot. There he found a small cave with a hermitage dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and the body of a hermit, Juan de Atarés. Voto and his brother Félix sold their possessions and settled in the cave as hermits, and tradition links the place with the legendary origins of the kingdom of Aragon. In recorded history, major building began in 1026 under Sancho the Great of Pamplona, and in 1071 King Sancho Ramírez gave the monastery to Cluniac monks. That same year, on 22 March 1071, the Roman rite of the Mass is said to have been celebrated here for the first time in Aragon, replacing the older Mozarabic liturgy. The lower church, carved partly into the rock, preserves earlier elements; above it the upper church and the Romanesque complex took shape in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The cloister is the great treasure. Its capitals were carved in two campaigns, the later group in the last third of the twelfth century by an anonymous sculptor known as the Master of San Juan de la Peña, or Master of Agüero. In crowded, expressive reliefs with large eyes and theatrical gestures he set out a cycle running from the creation of Adam and Eve and the story of Cain and Abel to the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Magi and the Last Supper. The former sacristy of the upper church became a royal pantheon where Ramiro I, Sancho Ramírez and Peter I, the first kings of the Aragonese dynasty, were buried with their queens; its present neoclassical decoration of marble and stucco medallions dates from 1770, under Charles III. A Spanish tradition holds that the chalice venerated as the Holy Grail was kept here from 1071 until 1399, before it passed by stages to Valencia Cathedral. After fires in 1494 and 1675 the monks moved to a new monastery, begun in 1705 on a plateau higher up the mountain. The old monastery became a National Monument in 1889, and the site lies on the Aragonese branch of the Way of Saint James.

Getting there

The monastery is in the municipality of Jaca, near the villages of Santa Cruz de la Serós and Botaya, about 47 km from Huesca. The nearest airport within Spain is Zaragoza Airport (ZAZ), about 98 km away; Pau Pyrénées Airport (PUF) in France is a similar distance in a straight line but lies across the Pyrenees.