The Magic of Sant Martí del Canigó

Sant Martí del Canigó is an early Romanesque monastery with two crypts. One of these may have been built upon an 8th C. sanctuary. The cloister, its capitals recuperated from sackings, perches on a cliff.

El canto de las vísperas

I remember my first visit to Sant Martí del Canigó with longing. It was an autumn afternoon, and the sun had begun to set. The steep climb from the Casteil to the monastery was especially wonderful, even though we were panting with the effort and surrounded by a mist that restricted our vision to five meters. We felt diminished among the trees that seemed to threaten us like the bars of a grid that kept appearing and disappearing. The spell was often broken by slides on the icy snow and our fear that the effort might be in vain at such a late hour. In fact, the monastery was closed when we arrived. We knocked on the door insistently until a nun opened up and told us that we could not enter, as the evening prayer had begun. “We only want to see the cloister, give us two minutes and we’ll leave. Please.” The nun stressed the risk she ran of being criticized by the mother superior for being late, took pity, and allowed us a peek into the cloister. A magic moment of ineffable charm took hold of me: from the monastery there arose a religious chant, the vespers, that seemed to be the song of angels. Riding on the notes I relished this sound become spirit, a dream become music. I was so moved that I refused to wake up. On the way down, listening to the silence, I strove in vain to recover the magic of those minutes that had brought me to another universe.
I returned to Conflent and to Sant Martí some time afterwards, on a splendid spring morning. Again I climbed up panting along the steep switchbacks the mist had prevented me from seeing. Half way, the Romanesque chapel of Sant Martí Vell gave me a chance to rest. Twenty minutes later the monastery appeared, majestic in the sun on top of the rocks, surrounded by mountains: Roc de Basosses, the peak of the Canigó, Gasamir, Sethomes, Tresvents, and many more. I understood that some men had exchanged glory and power to enjoy a life made of love, peace, and contemplation. People like Saint Pere Orséol, Duke of Venice. Or Guifré II, Count of Cerdenya and Conflent, who had the monastery built around A.D. 1000 and was buried at the foot of the belfry in 1049 next to his wife Elisabeth.
After a long and fickle history under the Benedictines, the monastery was abandoned in 1783. It was then sacked by revolutionaries, destroyed by local villagers, and abandoned to the hand of God. The verses of Verdaguer and the effort of Carsalade du Pont, Bishop of Perpignan, brought the monastery back to life in the 19th C. Today the nuns of the Benaventurades maintain the spiritual life of this place that made Guifré abandon courtly life and become a monk. With his own hands Guifré made a hole in a rock, awaiting the end of time; it was a rock that the giants who made the Canigó in the early times of legend, rolled here like a stepping-stone to heaven.//FÈLIX PUJOL

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The Magic of Sant Martí del Canigó

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