I have stayed there - a very special place and a very special albergue experience with a candlelight service in the church after dinner.
When I first visited Santa Maria de Eunate I had an overwhelming feeling that this was not a 'macho' Templar church. I imagined that it was a petite, feminine church, perhaps built by a wealthy, local Knight for his lady. A church, like the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, where she could worship while he was away in the Holy Land.
I visit it every time I do a
Camino Frances and in 2009 I spent a night at the albergue. Last year I mentioned my theory to the lady in the tourist office in Estella and she said that I wasn't far off.
According to a group of locals, it is a feminine church; the feminine church in a triangle enclosing a traditional holy landscape. The other two points of the triangle are San Pedro de la Rua in Estella (the hermaphrodite church) and San Sepulcro in Torres del Rio, which is the 'masculine' church. She said that none of these churches were built where they are by accident and that the land within the triangle is especially powerful.
Now, I don't more about that, but I do know that I felt the feminine power of Eunate and had a similar attraction to San Pedro de la Rua when I first visited there in 2002. When I wrote my novel, "Pilgrim Footprints on the Sands of Time" in 2004, I based the most important event in the book in San Pedro. There are amazing signs and symbols inside and outside the church only recently documented after 25 years of research.
The Camino has many layers. The path and the albergues and the people one meets are only the surface. Dig a little deeper and you will come closer to the rich symbology and tradition carved out by the Sons of Solomon.
