Ermita de San Marcos

Beautiful story, Beautiful land, a hidden treasure The image of the Virgin of Cirujeda is Romanesque of transition to Gothic, although its features are very archaic. It represents Mary sitting on a throne with the blessed Child Jesus sitting on her left knee. It seems that it comes from an ancient altarpiece spoken of in the parish documentation of the early 16th century, so that the carving is conceived only to show its forehead, while its back, barely treated, is hollowed out. According to the image restoration report (1999) it seems that due to certain features, such as the pointed nose of the Virgin, it has occitanic influences, which would not be strange considering the political and religious relationship that existed at that time between that region and the Señorío de Molina. The hermitage, in spite of having been modified in the last years, maintains its plant of a long and unique ship, with a simple cover of means arc point. Its only source of illumination came from a small window located in the head that has now been widened. In any case, it preserves the characteristics of the type of hermitages that were built during the Middle Ages in these territories of the Iberian System. In 1407 a friar of Santa María de Cirujeda is documented, although it is difficult to determine if it was a kind of santero or on the contrary of a member of a religious community installed there. In any case, it is known that the hermitage, although later it becomes attached to the parish of Alustante, had a certain independence from it; owned own vacant, an impo set a land of labor, orchards, and an ancient bucket mill that the neighbors of the towns of the region came to grind. This mill, when going to depend on the factory of the church of Alustante (at the beginning of the XVI this ascription is already a fact, although it is still remembered that the rents were separated in the old) was constituted in one of the most important sources of income for her. His other denomination, San Marcos, seems modern, although already in the eighteenth century it is called like that. The fact of this change of name is not due to any motive of change of dedication, but to the pilgrimage that since the Middle Ages was celebrated there on the day of the Greater Litany, that is, on April 25, Saint Frames. Cirujeda is, perhaps, one of the places of the town with more historical incoginitas. It seems that the place name indicates a place populated in the old by plum trees, and in it there is a deposit of Celtiberian origin with important foundry remains. It is said that in the reconquest the Moors hid there a treasure in a bull's skin, and as no one knows where exactly (although there are legends that say that the treasure was found) the tradition has transmitted a few verses dedicated to this uninhabited: Cirujeda, Cirujeda how rich and how poor you stay.