Los Laureles

Church of Santa Maria la Mayor

According to tradition, the Queen Berenguela de Castilla had a palace in Piedrahita dated from the twelfth-thirteenth century, which is now the parish church of the town. In one of the rooms of the palace, it is claimed, would place the birth of his son Ferdinand III nicknamed El Santo.

Today this building houses the Church of Santa Maria la Mayor or Church of the Assumption in which you can see different phases of construction since over a Romanesque phase the Gothic style overcame. It consists of three large areas, a sacristy, a Renaissance Tuscan cloister built in the sixteenth century, and a bell tower. The building has suffered several changes from the fifteenth century to the present, stand out especially those occurred in the twentieth century when the tower was raised in principle with battlements that are not preserved today.

Today, in addition to hosting the religious uses we can find inside the Museum of Sacred Art of the town where we can see pieces like the Tomb of the García Vargas, the Altarpiece of St. Anne, the wooden pulpit carved in the XV century, the choir, the railings or the baroque organ.

If we look inside we can also see many tombstones with inscriptions and shields from the various nobles and gentry of the town who were buried in the church following the old ways.

• MARTÍN RODRIGO, Ramón "Piedrahíta: Bosquejo Histórico", Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca, 1995

• LUNAS ALMEIDA, Jesús, "Historia del Señorío de Valdecorneja en la parte referente a Piedrahíta", Ávila, 1930.

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