El Monte de las Ánimas, Soria

OVERVIEW

The Monte de las Ánimas is a hill across the Duero from Soria, in Castile and León, carrying the ruins of a Templar monastery. The name is not a writer's invention: the hill is so called on the map.

HISTORY

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836–1870), the Spanish Romantic poet and one of the most widely read writers in the language, published El Monte de las Ánimas among his Leyendas in 1861, telling it as something he had heard in Soria and written down on All Souls' Night. In the story the Templars and the nobles of Castile killed each other over hunting rights on the hill, and on the night of All Souls the dead rise; a young woman sends her cousin back up the hill after dark to fetch a blue sash she has dropped, and he does not come back.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

This is a literary legend attached to a real and correctly named place, and it is filed as such — Bécquer's text is the document, and it is explicit that he is recording a local tradition rather than inventing one. The Leyendas are read aloud in Soria every 1 November, and the hill and the monastery ruins are walked. Spain's most-told ghost story has a street address.

VISITING

Open country across the Duero from Soria, walkable from the city; the ruins of the monastery of San Polo and the hermitage of San Saturio are on the same riverside path.