VI Coria
To the west of Toledo and to the south of the Sierra de Gata, which, with the mountains of Gredo and the Guaderrama, formed in the middle ages a natural frontier between Christians and Moors, lies, in a picturesque and fertile vale about twenty miles distant from the nearest railway station, the little known cathedral town of Coria. It is situated on the northern shores of the Alagón, a river flowing about ten miles farther west into the Tago, near where the latter leaves Spanish territory and enters that of Portugal.
Caurium, or Curia Vetona, was its name when the Romans held Extremadura, and it was in this town, or in its vicinity, that Viriato, the Spanish hero, destroyed four Roman armies sent to conquer his wild hordes. He never lost a single battle or skirmish, and might possibly have dealt a death-blow to Roman plans of domination in the peninsula, had not the traitor’s knife ended his noble career.
Their enemy dead, the Romans entered the city of Coria, which they immediately surrounded by a circular wall half a mile in length, and twenty-six feet thick (!). This Roman wall, considered by many to be the most perfectly preserved in Europe, is severely simple in structure, and flanked by square towers; it constitutes the city’s one great attraction.
The episcopal see was erected in 338. The names of the first bishops have long been forgotten, the first mentioned being one Laquinto, who signed the third Toledo Council in 589.
Two centuries later the Moors raised Al-Kárica to one of their capitals; in 854 Zeth, an ambitious Saracen warrior, freed it from the yoke of Cordoba, and reigned in the city as an independent sovereign.
Like Zamora and Toro, Coria was continually being lost and won by Christians and Moors, with this difference, that whereas the first two can be looked upon as the last Christian outposts to the north of the Duero, Coria was the last Arab stronghold to the north of the Tago.
Toward the beginning of the thirteenth century, the strong fortress on the Alagón was definitely torn from the hands of its independent sovereign by Alfonso VIII., after the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. A bishop was immediately reinstated in the see, and after five centuries of Mussulman domination, Coria saw the standard of Castile waving from its citadel.
As happened with so many other provincial towns in Spain, the centralization of power to the north of Toledo shoved Coria into the background; to-day it is a cathedral village forgotten or completely ignored by the rest of Spain. Really, it might perhaps have been better for the Arabs to have preserved it, for under their rule it flourished.
It is picturesque, this village on the banks of the Alagón: a heap or bundle of red bricks surrounded by grim stone walls, over-topped by a cathedral tower and citadel,—the whole picture emerging from a prairie and thrown against a background formed by the mountains to the north and the bright blue sky in the distance.
Arab influence is only too evident in the buildings and houses, in the Alcázar, and in the streets; unluckily, these remembrances of a happy past depress the dreamy visitor obliged to recognize the infinite sadness which accompanied the expulsion of the Moors by intolerant tyrants from the land they had inhabited, formed, and moulded to their taste. Nowhere is this so evident as in Coria, a forgotten bit of mediæval Moor-land. The poet’s exclamation is full of bitterness and resignation when he exclaims:
“Is it possible that this heap of ruins should have been in other times the splendid court of Zeth and Mondhir!”
As an architectural building, the cathedral of Coria is a parish church, which, removed to any other town, would be devoid of any and all beauty. In other words, the impressions it produces are entirely dependent upon its local surroundings; eliminate these, and the temple is worthless from an artistic or poetical point of view.
It was begun in 1120, most likely by Arab workmen; it was finished toward the beginning of the sixteenth century. Honestly speaking, it is a puzzle what the artisans did in all those long years; doubtless they slept at their task, or else decades passed away without work of any kind being done, or again, perhaps only one mason was employed at a time.
The interior is that of a simple Gothic church of one aisle, 150 feet long by fifty-two wide and eighty-four high; the high altar is situated in the rounded apse; in the centre of the church the choir stalls of the fifteenth century obstruct the view of the walls, decorated only by means of pilasters which pretend to support the Gothic vaulting.
To the right, in the altar chapel, is a fine marble sepulchre of the sixteenth century, in which the chasuble of the kneeling bishop portrayed is among the best pieces of imitative sculpture to be seen in Spain.
To the right of the high altar, and buried in the cathedral wall, a door leads out into the paseo,—a walk on the broad walls of the city, with a delightful view southwards across the river to the prairie in the distance. Where can a prettier and more natural cloister be found?
The western façade is never used, and is surrounded by the old cemetery,—a rather peculiar place for a cemetery in a cathedral church; the northern façade is anti-artistic, but the tower to the right has one great virtue, that of comparative height. Though evidently intended to be Gothic, the Arab taste, so pronounced throughout this region, got the better of the architect, and he erected a square steeple crowned by a cupola.
Yet, and in spite of criticism which can hardly find an element worthy of praise in the whole cathedral building, the tourist should not hesitate in visiting the city. Besides, the whole region of Northern Extremadura, in which Coria and Plasencia lie, is historically most interesting: Yuste, where Charles-Quint spent the last years of his life, is not far off; neither is the Convent of Guadalupe, famous for its pictures by the great Zurbaran.
As for Coria itself, it is a forgotten corner of Moor-land.