Click here to go to the home page of Casas de Lorenzo in Montefrio, Granada, Andalucia. Villa and cottage rental, holiday homes in Andalucia, rural homes in  Granada Province, vacation homes in rural Andalusia.

 

The Christ of the Cataracts

 

 Moclín, less than 20 miles to the east of Montefrio, is famous to historians for the very romantic ruins of a castle where bloody battles were fought between Christians and Moors.  But for simple folk all around, even until the present day, Moclín evokes the miracles worked by its sacred oil painting of Christ.  Many of them take part in the romería or pilgrimage which, in its more scandalous form, was held every 5th of October, until it was “sanitized” by the Catholic Church, not long after I first visited the region.

After Isabel and Ferdinand conquered the Castle of Moclín - in the same year they took Montefrio, 1486 - they donated one of their banners to the new church which was built under the ramparts. This banner, duly framed for hanging by the altar, was painted with a picture of Christ staggering under the weight of the Cross.

One October 5th, some 100 years later, the half-blind Sacristan was washing the years of grime off it when he suddenly found his sight restored. Since he suffered from cataracts, an illness known as "the disease of the cloth", or el paño (to have la vista empañada means to have blurry vision, as if the eyes were covered with a cloth), the Christ who worked the miracle became known as the "Christ of the Cataracts".

 Word spread and sick people came from all over the region, particularly those with visual disorders.  But over the centuries the picture also became famous for helping barren women conceive.  It was said that they merely had to wipe the canvas with a piece of linen, as the Sacristan had done, when it was carried before them in the yearly procession.

This attracted many pilgrimesses who, evil tongues claimed, got pregnant not with the help of the picture but that of the field workers who thronged to the romería.  Husbands who had despaired of having any offspring took their wives there to be "cured", and the wives were told to go into the woods at sundown to weave themselves a crown of vervain blossoms to wear at the procession in the morning.  This was the cue for the local blades to follow hot on their heels, while the unsuspecting husbands were jeered at by the villagers.

An obscure disciple of Manuel de Falla, called Gustavo Pittaluga, even composed a satirical operette on the subject, called La romería de los cornudos – “the pilgrimage of the cuckolds”.  The libretto was written by his friend Federico García Lorca, and with much ribald buffoonery tells how the lecherous Sacristan – presumably more robust than his ailing predecessor of the cataracts – spends the night in the forest with a pilgrimess. Meanwhile, her unsuspecting husband celebrates his coming paternity by dancing around the bonfire dressed as a he-goat covered in small horns. 

In Spain as in Italy, the horns which everyone sees but the one who wears them are the dreaded symbol of the cuckold – el cornudo.