Legends and Stories of Torreciudad
The castle, the image found and the miraculous child · Huesca
The Sanctuary of Torreciudad is surrounded by a rich oral tradition that intertwines the history of the medieval castle, the finding of the Romanesque image of the Virgin and the most known and documented prodigy of the place: the healing of little Josemaría Escriva in 1904.
The medieval castle of Torreciudad
The history of the place begins with the Aragonese Reconquest. During the X and XI centuries, the kingdom of Aragon expanded to the south, taking land from the Muslim kingdoms of the Ebro Valley. In this process of progress and repopulation, Christian lords built castles and surveillance towers at the strategic points of the territory. Torreciudad was one of those points: a rocky promontory that dominated the Cinca River Valley and its tributaries.
The castle of Torreciudad - whose existence is documented in medieval Aragonese sources - served for centuries as a border fortress and a center of a small lordship. Around the main tower there was a small town or "city," from which comes the compound name of the place. With the advance of the Reconquest and the pacification of the territory, the castle lost its military function and was gradually abandoned. Today there are only traces of its walls in the promontory on which the modern sanctuary is located.
The image found in the tower
The popular tradition of Somontano tells that the image of the Virgin was found in the castle tower or in its vicinity in remote times. According to the most extensive versions, pastors or peasants of the region found the small size of wood in a hidden place of the fortress - perhaps a cavity in the walls or an underground space - and took it to a provisional chapel enabled for its veneration.
This narrative of the "finding" of the image is a very common pattern in the Spanish medieval Marian hagiography: the Virgin "appears" or "is found" in a particular place - a cave, a tree, a tower - as a sign that she herself chooses that site for her sanctuary. In the case of Torreciudad, the castle tower is the locus chosen by the Lady, which symbolically reinforces the fusion between the protective function of the military strength and the spiritual protection of the Mother of God.
The Miraculous Healing of Josemaría Escriva (1904)
Of all the stories linked to Torreciudad, the most documented and the most projection has had is the healing of the small Josemaría Escriva de Balaguer in 1904. Josemaría was born on January 9, 1902 in Barbastro, an episcopal city about 25 kilometres from the sanctuary. His parents, José Escrivá Corzan and Maria de los Dolores Albás Blanc, were a marriage of medium-sized traders, deeply believers.
The child Josemaría, only two years old, falls seriously ill. The doctor who takes care of him in Barbastro finds no cure and gives him for evicted. His parents, desperate, make a promise to the Virgin of Torreciudad: if the child is healthy, they will take him on a pilgrimage to the sanctuary.
The disease that affected the little Josemaría is described in family testimonies as very serious, although the documents of the time do not allow for precise clinical diagnosis. What is clear is that the medical prognosis was negative and that the parents resorted to the intercession of the Virgin of Torreciudad as the last hope.
The child healed unexpectedly, recovering completely. Faithful to his promise, the Escriva family made the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Torreciudad, carrying the little Josemaría in the arms or in the arms of his mother on the horseshoe path that then led to the promontory.
This personal link between Josemaría Escriva and the Virgin of Torreciudad would mark her whole life. When decades later, already as the founder of Opus Dei, it was proposed to promote a great Marian sanctuary in Aragon, the choice of Torreciudad was natural and emotional: it was the place where, according to her own conviction, the Virgin had returned her life as a child.
El embalse que rodeó el santuario
A more recent, although equally unique, history is that of Grade Embalse. In the late 1960s, the construction of this reservoir on the Cinca River transformed the landscape of the Somontano. The waters of the reservoir, when filled, surrounded the rocky promontory of Torreciudad on three sides, making the sanctuary a kind of peninsula or atalaya on the artificial lake.
For those who believed in the protection of the Virgin over that place, the resulting configuration had some providential: the Virgin of Torreciudad was literally on an island of faith, surrounded by the waters and with the Pyrenees at the bottom. The landscape that today contemplates the pilgrim - the stone sanctuary on the rock, the blue reservoir, the snow mountains - is the result of this confluence between nature, hydraulic engineering and faith.
The Lords of Torreciudad
The medieval Aragonese chronicles mention the Lords of Torreciudad as a noble family of little historical relevance outside the region, but with an important role in the conservation of the place and the hermitage. The lords of the castle would have been the first promoters of the chapel where the image of the Virgin was venerated, integrating it into the defensive ensemble of the castle as an element of spiritual protection.
With the decadence of the lordship and the abandonment of the castle - probably between the 14th and 16th centuries - the hermitage was placed under the care of the nearby parishes and the covarias of devotees of the region. This continuity of popular devotion, without high-weight religious or monastic support, is one of the most striking features of the history of Torreciudad: the simple faith of the Aragonese people kept alive the flame of the sanctuary for centuries of relative institutional abandonment.