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Culture
Virgen del Pilar hermitage
Following the road that connecting Murero with Manchones, the latter municipality contains the Virgen del Pilar hermitage. It is a small 17th century masonry building, whose exterior is notable for its powerful buttresses corresponding to the interior pilasters. Although for many centuries there was a little house where the hermit lived, today nothing of this annex building remains.
The doorway is made of ashlar and the door is set in a semicircular arch carved in broad ashlars, with a small niche at the top. The walls are masonry with a brick cornice consisting of two units.
Through this simple doorway we can enter the interior of the Baroque-style enclosure, which is plastered all over. Once inside, you will find a floor plan featuring a single nave with four bays and a low barrel vault with lunettes. The vault is supported by segmental arches and attached pilasters.
The interior is topped by a three-sided polygonal chancel with a very flat semicircular vault on pendentives, the result of the intersection of this semicircle with the semi-octagonal plan created by the walls. At the narthex is the upper choir supported on three semicircular arches on wood and two pillars, all of them covered with lunette vaults.
Overlooking this area of the hermitage is a gilded wooden reredos with a bench, three aisles and a semicircular finial. The streets are separated by Solomonic columns and on the sides, there are estipites: anthropomorphic columns. This piece was gilded in 1723 thanks to Luis de Castro, then the hermitage’s hermit.