Lignum crucis

The Chapel of the Lignum Crucis or Tree of the Cross, Vera Cruz or Santa Cruz, in the monastery of Santo Toribio de Lliébana (Calameño, Cantabria). The Lignum Crucis, the largest piece of the cross - left arm with a nail hole - in which Jesus of Nazareth was assassinated, which is still preserved and one of the few that the Catholic Church admits as authentic; one of the relics brought by Santo Toribio from the Holy Land between the ss. V-VI. It came here supposedly in the middle of the s. IX together with the body of Santo Toribio, bishop of Astorga with the Christians who fled from the Muslim invasion of the old Asturica Augusta. In 1958, the Madrid Institute of Forest Sciences determined that the wood was evergreen oriental cypress with more than 2,000 years old. Two fragments that have a cross made in the s. XVI, by the Benedictine monks who inhabited the monastery, and inserted in a magnificent Plateresque reliquary inside a two-section gilded canopy (1705), a tabernacle or temple in the center of the Baroque chapel (XVIII century) added to the North facing of the monastery, according to the design of the Benedictine architect from Burgos, frai Pedro Martínez de Cardeña. Covered by Don Francisco de Otero y Cossio (1640-1714), archbishop of Santa Fe de Bogotá and inquisitor of Madrid, whose praying statue - the work of the Asturian sculptor Antonio de Borja (1661-1730) - can be seen in this chapel. Cost: 12,000 pesos for the chapel and 11,000 reales for the tabernacle.