Logbook · 7 places

What to see and do in Santo Domingo de Silos

What to see and do in Santo Domingo de Silos (Sierra de la Demanda, Burgos): 7 places across monuments, nature, activities and curiosities, with a photo and a Google Maps location.

1 Villages · 1 Monuments · 2 Nature · 2 Curiosities · 1 Historical milestones

How far each place is from the centre of Santo Domingo de Silos

The Romanesque cloister of Silos 100 m
The gorge of la Yecla 2.3 km

Towns near Santo Domingo de Silos

Spain › Castile and León › Burgos › Sierra de la Demanda › Santo Domingo de Silos

What to see and do in Santo Domingo de Silos

Santo Domingo de Silos
Village
Santo Domingo de Silos is a town of 251 inhabitants famous for its Benedictine monastery, whose Romanesque cloister —today the only part preserved of the original building, together with the Puerta de las Vírgenes— was already standing in 1081, the year of the Cid's exile, who together with his wife Jimena had donated estates to the monastery. The monastery, originally dedicated to Saint Sebastian in Visigothic times, owes its fame to the renovation undertaken around 1042 by the monk Domingo, born in Cañas, commissioned by Ferdinand I. The town, on the banks of the Mataviejas or Ura river, preserves walls, crested mansions, a Gothic church and the Museum of the Sounds of the Earth. Together with Lerma and Covarrubias it forms the so-called Arlanza Triangle, and its municipal area also includes Peñacoba, Hortezuelos and Hinojar de Cervera.
The Romanesque cloister of Silos
Monument
Begun shortly after 1080, the lower cloister of the monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos (Burgos) brings together sixty-four historiated capitals, with biblical, animal and plant motifs, and the reliefs on its corners, the work of two different masters. The first, active in the southeast corner, is responsible for the Ascension and Pentecost; the second, possibly of Galician origin and linked to the style of Santiago de Compostela by the abundance of drapery folds, for the Tree of Jesse and the Annunciation. The north and east galleries of the lower cloister have fourteen arches on each side, supported by double-shaft columns and ornamental capitals in the Romanesque tradition.
The cypress of Silos and Gerardo Diego's sonnet
Curiosity
In the south-west corner of the cloister grows a cypress of more than thirty metres and a century and a half of life. Gerardo Diego visited it in July 1924 and turned it into an upright fountain of shade and dream, one of the most recited sonnets in Spanish.
The monastery's apothecary
Curiosity
The monastic pharmacy served the residents by means of retainers paid in grain or an annual fee. It preserves the distillation laboratory and the room of jars and botany books that fray Isidoro de Saracha assembled with his plant garden.
The album that took Gregorian chant into the charts
Historical milestone
In 1994 the album Chant, recorded by the monks, reached third place on the Billboard 200 chart and triple platinum: it is the best-selling Gregorian chant record in history and it was followed by Chant Noël and Chant II.
The gorge of la Yecla
Nature
The Cauce stream has cut in the limestone a gorge so narrow that the sun barely reaches the bottom. It is walked from end to end along a succession of walkways and bridges hung above the channel, a few kilometres from the monastery.
The Sabinares del Arlanza-La Yecla Natural Park
Nature
Created on 14 December 2020, it protects 39,173 hectares spread across twenty-one municipalities. Around a hundred pairs of griffon vulture nest on its cliffs, along with Egyptian vulture, golden eagle and peregrine falcon. The park, close to the Cañón del Río Lobos park, takes its second name from the La Yecla gorge, a narrow ravine cut by the arroyo del Cauce through the limestone of the Peñas de Cervera, today crossed by bridges and hanging walkways. Its limestone slopes support extensive stands of Spanish juniper, with specimens over 2,000 years old, alongside holm oak, Portuguese oak, and forests of Scots pine, black pine and maritime pine.