Hermitage of Nuestra Señora de Belén

Phone: 967200001 (Ayuntamiento)

Email: lietor@dipualba.es

Website: www.dipualba.es/munici...

Location

In the highest part of the town.

Type of monument

Religious Architecture

History

The hermitage is mentioned in the Relación (List)of 1579. The costs of building were met, according to an inscription, by Alonso de Tovarra and his wife in 1570.

How to get there

Road transport

The Hermitage of Nuestra Señora de Belén is a very simple rectangular building, with diaphragm arches and wooden ceiling. Its principal interest is in the great series of pictures that adorn ever corner of the building, including some very peculiar popular images, made between 1734 and 1735.

Everything is painted, altars, drapes, illusory architecture, with a naïve and colourist feel. As with the best of popular aesthetics. Stylistically these murals are filled with enchanting archaisms and imperfections, but this is perhaps what makes them so interesting. Saints, scenes, decorations, even the allegory of death, occasionally accompanied by phrases and exemplary verse.

The overall effect offers great iconographic variety, among which the Lady Chapel with its naïvely supposed dome held by the four evangelists and topped with the Holy Spirit is particularly noteworthy.

The front also displays a wide variety of solomonic columns topped with a balustrade, where angels sit with instruments. The space’s three sections of wall, between the columns, show a Visitation, La Sagrada Familia and la Inmaculada. Particularly beautiful for its simplicity is the first of these scenes.

Many other painted altars fill the interior of the hermitage, such as the images of San Antonio and Santa Bárbara.