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San Francisco Hotel Monumento
Santiago de Compostela, Spain · Independent · Accessible Luxury
A working Franciscan convent 150 metres from the cathedral, where the friars still live on their side of the wall and guests sleep in the rest of it. The house dates itself to Saint Francis, said to have walked here in 1214 and asked a charcoal burner named Cotolay to raise a convent in the valley, on land bought from the monks of San Martino for a yearly rent of one basket of trout. What you actually stay in is the eighteenth-century rebuild, opened as a hotel in October 2005, with glass panels at the door looking down onto the thirteenth-century church underneath.
- 82 rooms
- Opened 2005
- Neighborhood: Casco Histórico
About San Francisco Hotel Monumento
- Dinner is served in the old refectory of 1730, a 300 square metre hall under five vaulted arches ten metres high, and the kitchen is the only one in Galicia given over to convent cooking.
- The convent's Terra Santa museum holds more than 700 objects brought back from the Holy Land, a collection the friars describe as the only one of its kind anywhere.
- Cotolay's tomb still stands at the entrance, rebuilt in 1798, and five Gothic arches of the original convent survive in the cloister of the fountain.
- Historians date the Saint Francis founding legend to the sixteenth century rather than to 1214, which has never stopped pilgrims stopping to read the carved stone that tells it.
- Behind the walls lie 30,000 square metres of convent grounds, and the heated indoor pool looks out to Monte Pedroso.
History
The Convento de San Francisco de Valdedios stands just outside the line of the old city wall, in a hollow the friars renamed from Hell's Valley to the Valley of God. Tradition holds that Saint Francis of Assisi came to Santiago on pilgrimage in 1214 and asked Cotolay, a poor charcoal burner, to found a convent there, the land granted by the monks of San Martino for the symbolic annual rent of a basket of trout; Cotolay, the story goes, could pay for it after a miraculous find of treasure. Scholars place the formulation of that legend in the sixteenth century rather than in Francis's lifetime, but the friars carved the date 1214 over the side door and have guarded the site as a relic ever since.
What stands today is mostly Baroque. The cloister of the fountain went up from 1613, attributed to Xacome Fernandez, replacing the Gothic one; the main convent staircase dates from 1679, the De Profundis hall from 1719 and the monumental refectory from 1730. The medieval church was demolished in 1741 after centuries of patching, and the present church was finished in the later eighteenth century, with a neoclassical alteration to the front and a Saint Francis by the sculptor Ferreiro. Cotolay's mausoleum was built at the entrance in 1798. Mendizabal's exclaustration expropriated the convent in 1836.
The friars ran a pilgrims' hostel here for generations, the Hostal Hogar San Francisco. Five years of restoration turned it into San Francisco Hotel Monumento, which opened in October 2005 with 82 rooms, panoramic lifts, a heated indoor pool and archaeological windows in the entrance floor showing the remains of the thirteenth-century church. The building is a listed Bien de Interes Cultural and the convent is still the seat of the Franciscan Province of Santiago; the friars have not moved out.
The setting
The hotel is 150 metres from the cathedral that ends the Camino de Santiago, on the Campillo de San Francisco at the edge of a UNESCO World Heritage old town. This is the quiet side of the pilgrimage: the Obradoiro square and the Praza da Inmaculada are a few minutes on foot, the Alameda park and the old university streets a little further, and the convent's own 30,000 square metres of grounds fall away behind the building toward open green and a view of Monte Pedroso. Asorei's Monument to Saint Francis, a giant stone cross, stands in the porch outside, and the Terra Santa museum is part of the same complex.
Restaurants and bars
- Comedor Monumental — Restaurant · cocina gallega
Amenities
- Wifi y ADSL en salones
- Organización de eventos por departamento de eventos
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