A visit to the Mosteiro de Pombeiro

As I was reading the Romanesque literature I had picked up in the fancy hotel, I read about the monastery of Pombeiro. The caminho goes right by it, but it would be totally closed up early in the morning.

So I hopped in a cab, had a very interesting visit, and then walked the 5 km back.

There was no one there except me, the security guard, and a woman cleaning the church. At first the guard seemed kind of uninterested and brusque. But as he took me around he really got into it and showed me all kinds of little details I would otherwise never have seen.

Unfortunately most of the Romanesque is gone, except for the outside doorway. Baroque is what predominates in the church. But he showed me a 12C carved stone in one of the walls that said— “Here are the relics of (I think) Peter, Paul, Santiago, and Tomás.”No one knows whether there really were relics or what happened to them.

The cloisters (there had been three) have all been destroyed and the pieces spirited away. The French are not surprisingly blamed. The wing where the monks lived has been turned into a social center of sorts, and there was a little chapel and a library.

But the best part of the visit was the organ. It was fascinating. I had no idea that in the days before electricity, you needed some strong people to activate the bellows to provide the air. Three of them. Then he showed me all the knobs on either side of the organ itself. Each one performs a special function. But two of the ones on the left are not functional. He explained that they put them there purely for symmetry. While all the other knobs have some explanatory information, the two fake knobs have “I am mute“ in French and “I don’t speak“ in Italian.

That means that it took at least three people in addition to the organist to play. Two doing the knobs, and at least one on the bellows.

And then this guy sat down to play. Here’s where the story gets fascinating. Four years ago a tuner came to the monastery and had the guard push the keys one at a time so that he could do the tuning. From there the guard started teaching himself how to play. I’m no judge of organists, but it was pretty beautiful. He told me that one visitor offered to pay his tuition to send him to music school, but he couldn’t afford to give up his job. He can’t read music, he just listens at home and then comes in to work and plays around till he gets it. There was even an article in a Portuguese magazine called Evasões talking about him, Bruno Ramos, the auto-didactico. I will have to hunt for it on line.

I feel so lucky to have had this wonderful experience. Getting these little glimpses into other peoples’ lives just makes it all more obvious that we’re just one big pot of humanity, each one of us unique, but also connected.

I never dreamed when I started walking this morning that my day would be like this!Read more