Santarém
"One of the great panoramic landscapes of Europe"
Santarém Valley - José Manuel
The city of Santarém is built upon a hill above the river Tagus and was one of the earliest towns to be created near Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. From the Portas do Sol the whole valley of the Tagus can be seen, described by Tennyson´s travelling partner as "one of the great panoramic landscapes of Europe" in 1859. During the 7th century the body of St. Irene was brought here and the town has a very unusual legend attached to it.
However, for me the most interesting saint associated with Santarem is the Blessed St. Gil of Santarém. Gil was born in the 12th century, son of the governor of Coimbra, Rodrigo Pelayo Valladaris. His parents were keen that he should enter the church and he recieved a lavishly funded ecclesiastical education.
Gil however had no interest in the church and studied philosophy and medicine at Coimbra. He had planned to travel to Paris, France to further his studies but, according to his unknown contemporaneous biographer, he met a stranger who offered to teach him the art of Cermonial Magic at Toledo. The stranger required that Gil should sign a pact with the devil, in his own blood, promising great wealth and power in return for his soul.
Gil allegedly accepted these terms and spent the next seven years studying Magic before finally going to Paris, obtaining a degree in medicine and becoming famous and wealthy by performing miraculous cures. However after enjoying many years as a successful physician and magician Gil was struck by a series of visions inwhich an enormous knight demanded he repent his ways or be punished. Gil apparently repented, burnt his books of Magic and returned to Portugal and spent seven years in prayer and penance as a Dominican monk in Santarém.
According to his anonymous biographer, Gil´s soul was finally rescued from Satan by the intervention of the Blessed Virgin and Gil´s cult was ratified by Benedict XIV in 1748. The great 19th century Portuguese classical poet Almeida Garrett regarded the Blessed Friar Gil as being potentially one of the greatest figures of Portuguese history, and bewailed the fact that there was no Goethe to immortalise the saint in the manner of Dr Faust.
"Then his passionate craving for knowledge, his vast studies, the hidden
mysteries of nature he uncovered in order to penetrate the invisible world;
the thirst for gold, for pleasure and for power that obsessed him and
caused him to fall into the clutches of the evil one; the disgust and
surfeit that disillusioned him afterwards; finally his repentance and the
regeneration of his soul through penances, prayer and contempt for vain
human science - these different phases of such an extraordinary poetic
existence would then be shown as they have yet to be seen, because no
one has yet seen them with the eyes of a great moralist and a great
poet, such as are needed to observe and understand them."
Almeida Garrett
Travels in my Homeland
Hotels in Santarém
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