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Holy Cave of Covadonga

Cangas de Onís, Oriente, Asturias

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Holy Cave of Covadonga

Monument · Cangas de Onís, Oriente, Asturias

A hollow opened in the rock of Mount Auseva, in Cangas de Onís, where the Virgin of Covadonga is venerated and where tradition places the victory of Pelayo; it is reached through a cave or by climbing 103 steps from the pool. The sanctuary that occupied it burned down in 1777, destroying the original carving of the Virgin; the current one, from the 16th century, was donated in 1778 by the cathedral of Oviedo, and during the Civil War it disappeared until it was found in 1939 at the Spanish embassy in France. The current chapel, neo-Romanesque, is the work of Luis Menéndez-Pidal y Álvarez. The cave also served as a royal pantheon: buried there were Pelayo, his wife Queen Gaudiosa, and Alfonso I the Catholic with Queen Ermesinda.

Photo: Arturo Nikolai (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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