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San Pedro el Viejo, in Huesca, the protagonist in Las Fotos de los Lectores de La Vanguardia, is one of the oldest churches in Spain.
It was Visigothic and Mozarabic and, in the 12th century, the current one was built. During the Muslim domination its Christian character was respected.
With the conquest of the city from the Muslims, Pedro I ceded it to the monastery of Saint Ponc de Tomières, France, becoming a Benedictine monastery.
It contains the remains of San Justo y Pastor and the kings Alfonso I the Battler and Ramiro II the Monk, as well as a beautiful cloister.
The main altar is the work of Juan de Berrueta and Juan Ali. There are beautiful sculptures of the Virgen de las Nieves and the Virgen de la Esperanza.
A chapel contains the mortal remains of San Justo and Pastor with a canvas representing the martyrdom.
The cloister is an exceptional sample of an anonymous sculptor, the so-called master of San Juan de la Peña. It contains 38 capitals related to the life of Jesus, scenes from the Old Testament, with voids and sin, and on the taking of the city.
The most important chapel in the cloister is that of San Bartolomé, which houses the remains of the last Aragonese kings Alfonso I and Ramiro IIasi, as well as the last Benedictine prior, Bernardo Alter Zapila.
Antonia Buisan Chaves, art historian and tour guide, very kindly accompanies me on the visit and has a beautiful surprise for me: a room attached to the cloister where Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who studied high school in Huesca, did photographic practices, becoming a pioneer of color photography.
The church has also been secularized and recently the journalist and friend Javier GarcÃa Anton presented his book Contra-corriente in this cloister, with the attendance of 200 people.
San Pedro el Viejo (veteris) increases its beauty and its magic with the course of the centuries.
