Our Lady of the Heather

Patron of the Palentina Mountain

On the top of the Sierra del Brezo, more than a thousand four hundred metres away, a serrano sanctuary keeps the patron saint of the Palentina Mountain; every September 21, the day of St. Matthew, thousands of faithful go up in the most important Romany of the region.

Origin and history

There is a written record of pilgrimages to the place of the Brezo since 1535, and in 1607, by the bull of Paul V, the foundation of the Brezo Brotherhood, a sign of an already consolidated Marian cult, was authorized. The headline image is a Romanesque size of the 13th century. The present temple rises on an ancient hermitage that tradition - "not without legend" - attributes to Alfonso X the Wise; the sanctuary preserved for centuries a community of monks, who abandoned it with the Deamortization, around 1835. It was crowned canonically in 1961 by the bishop of Palencia, with a bull of John XXIII.

The local legend tells that in 1478 the Virgin appeared to two extremist pastors, entrusting them to seek in the mountains a place called the Fountain of the Brezo, where they would find a forgotten image between the thickness and a ruined hermitage; a story that the sources themselves present as tradition. The most characteristic feature is the Romeria del Brezo of 21 September, a multitudinarian and deep arraigo, which brings together the faithful of all the Palentina Mountain in the explanade of the sanctuary and is considered one of the most important in the province.