Sor Juana de la Cruz (1481 - 1534)

Cubas de la Sagra

As you walk out of the village of Cubas de la Sagra into the plain, the tip of the spire of the convent dome emerges from a hollow in the middle of the wheat fields of La Sagra. The entire story of Sor Juana de la Cruz is bound up with this location; it constitutes an essential space around which her visions as well as her life were centred. It was her place of authority in her career, and the locus of her spiritual authority. Down the track that leads to the convent travelled, in their time, the Emperor Charles V and Cardenal Cisneros (to meet Sor Juana alive) and about a century later, Felipe III and his Archbishop of Toledo (to see her, exhumed, and to corroborate the sweet odour of sanctity that came from her uncorrupted remains).

The convent of Santa María de la Cruz as you see it now is completely restored. It suffered from the depradations of the Peninsular War, when it was used by the French troops for artillery practice. In the Civil War, it was reduced by German as well as Republican artillery. The nuns at the time of the Civil War were Clarissas, as the small community still is today, belonging to the order that took over from the Franciscan tertiaries ( = Sor Juana's order, La Orden Tercera de San Francisco). Sisters were killed in the Civil War. In common with many religious houses in Spain which had been reduced to ruins, either long before in the desamortización of Mendizabal in 1835 or in the hostilities of the Civil War, the convent at Cubas was rebuilt under a regime which favoured the restoration of traditional religious values and authority. The rebuilding and the re-establishment of a Clarissa community renewed the cult of this local visionary ; in its rebuilt state, the remains of the saint, said to be authentic and recovered from the devastation that the original convent underwent, form an important link with the past. A modern tomb occupies a conspicuous place in the chapel. The crucifix reproduced on the bookmark on the right is said to have been Sor Juana's and, like most things about her, to be of supernatural provenance.