Sanabria is a land of legends and fantastic stories, where the " witches ", spells , the evil eye and the " llobu " have a leading role.
Legend
One of the most famous legends, perhaps because it was a premonition of the catastrophe that occurred in Ribadelago , is the one that narrates the origin of the Lake . They say that one fine day he arrived at the village of Valverde de Lucernaa pilgrim asking for alms, and to whom no one attended him, except for some women bakers who were baking bread in the oven of this town. They took pity on him, and let him enter the oven room so that he could take shelter from the intense cold and satisfy his hunger with some more dough that they put in the oven. The dough that they put in the oven grew so much that finally the bread came out of the oven and the women, surprised by this fact, heard from the mouth of the pilgrim, who turned out to be Jesus Christ, the punishment that he was going to impose on the people for their lack of charity: it would flood the village, so they had to flee their homes to take refuge in the mountains. Then the man stuck his stick in the ground saying:
"Here I stick my stick
here comes a gargallón
here I dig my iron
Let a gargallete come out."
The water gushed out flooding the town of Valverde, saving from the waters only the oven, which today forms the small island in the Lake .
The legend continues that the surrounding residents wanted to remove the two bells from the sunken church, employing two well-fed jacks to do so. However, one of them had been milked from the mother and had not been able to suck, spilling part of the milk from the animal's back. This finally could not remove the bell from the bottom of the Lake and the well-fed told him:
"Pull ox bragau
that the milk quí milking
for the llomu it was ejeu
Come here bragau.
-I can't, I'm here milking, he replied "
The bell that was sinking said to the other that was going out:
"You're leaving, Greeny,
I stay Bamba
and until the end of the world
I won't be kicked out"
And this is the bell that good men can hear pealing from the depths of the waters on the night of San Juan .
Origins of the Legend
In reality, the origin of the legend can be traced back to the year 1109, when a monk from the French region of Poitou named Aymeric Picaud began a journey with the aim of accompanying the pontiff Calixtus , Guido of Burgundy , on the pilgrimage he was going to carry out to Santiago de Compostela . At the end of the trip, the monk Aymerico wrote a manuscript in which he narrated the vicissitudes of the trip and which he called the Liber Sancti Iacobi . The book became famous and was known throughout Europe under the name of Codex Calixtinus , and became a sort of guide for travelers to Compostela during the Middle Ages .. In the fourth book of the Codex, known as the Pseudo Turpin (since Picaud attributed its authorship to Turpin, Bishop of Reims in the 8th century), the legendary exploits of Charlemagne in Hispania are told. There it is said that the Emperor subdued more than a hundred cities in the peninsula, of which only three put up a fierce resistance, so that Charlemagne not only destroyed them when he conquered them, but also cursed them, so that they would be reduced to ruins forever. . Two of these three cities, Capparria (it seems that the current Ventas de Caparra , in the province of Cáceres ) and Adania (it seems that Idaña La Vieja , inPortugal ), were already in ruins when Picaud composed the text; however, it is the third, Lucerna Ventosa , that is of most interest, since it is the one that will end up giving the name to the legendary city submerged in Lake Sanabria .
According to the story told in the Pseudo Turpin, when the Emperor prays to God to give him the city, the walls of Lucerne fall down and a dirty whirlwind of water begins to sprout from the ground and floods the city, turning the place into a pool of murky waters in which large black fish swim. We don't really know where that legendary city was, or what location Picaud was thinking of when he wrote the text. Currently, there is agreement among the authors who have studied Picaud's work the most in considering that the city was located in the land of Bierzo , in the current province of León, on the road to Santiago. According to this hypothesis, the lake in the legend is Lake Carucedo , originating near the Roman mines oflas Médulas , a lake that would have been formed after the destruction of Lucerna, which is identified with the Castro de Ventosa . So far, the legend linked to the Camino de Santiago.
Picaud was able to name the town Lucerne after the Swiss town of the same name. It is a city that in the Middle Ages was linked as the abode of the body of Pontius Pilate , the Roman governor of Judea who did nothing to prevent the death of Christ. In the Middle Ages a legend claimed that this Lucerne was actually a new city that had been built next to a lake in which a city was submerged and destroyed by Charlemagne by refusing to surrender. Picaud, our monk, probably knew the legend of Swiss Lucerne and transcribed it for his work on the Iberian Peninsula.
The step that remained to be taken, that is, the arrival of Lucerne in Sanabria, is related to the communication that undoubtedly existed between the Cistercian monks of the Carracedo Monastery , founded in the 10th century, and to which the Lake of Carucedo belonged. with the monks, also Cistercians, from the Monastery of San Martín de Castañeda , owners of the Sanabria lake. At some point, one of the monks took the story from one lake to another. And if there, in the lake of Berciano, there was talk of a curse, here the story took on a religious nuance by ascertaining that it was God, in the form of a pilgrim, who destroyed the town due to the greed and lack of charity of its neighbors.
The medieval and beautiful legend woven around the lake of Sanabria , was raised to the category of literature in the novel that Miguel de Unamuno titled " San Manuel Bueno, martyr " (1930), and in which the professor of the University of Salamanca converted the name of the already legendary town into Valverde de Lucerna:
"Sunken Bell Tower
of Valverde of Lucerne
touch of eternal agony
under the water of oblivion..."
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