---

San Juan de Duero, also known as Arcos de San Juan de Duero, forms a group of Castilian Romanesque architecture located on the outskirts of the city of Soria, Castilla León (Spain).



What can be seen today, the church and the cloister, are nothing but the remains of a monastery of the Military Order of the Hospitallers of San Juan de Jerusalem or San Juanistas knights raised in the first half of the 12th century on the banks of the Douro River and that it remained inhabited until the 18th century.



Church



The church is very simple, with a single nave with a presbytery and an apse; the former, with a pointed half-barrel vault, and the latter, semicircular with a furnace vault. It would not have anything striking if it were not for the two temples arranged one on each side of the presbytery as an iconostasis, so that the space that remained between them could be closed and the priest hidden at the time of consecration, following the rules of the Greek rite. It consists of two canopies, one with a spherical dome, and the other conical, but in both cases spiked and mounted on columns with a quadruple shaft and unique capital and base. The capitals have figurative reliefs of meritorious work staging evangelical and allegorical passages.

The cloister



With these two pavilions being original, the cloister built in the 13th century is even more so. It forms an irregular quadrilateral whose four angles, that is, the chamfered corner itself and the semillars that concur in it, are different from each other. The northwestern corner, before the others, is typically Romanesque, with semicircular arches and a running base. The northeastern one has no base, being its columns of quadruple shafts arranged in the shape of a cross, and its tumid arches. The southeastern vertex has ribbed columns with a square section and tumid arches that intersect each other. The other angle, the southwest, has columns with double circular shafts and ornate capitals, on which the pointed arches that cross in a similar way to those of the previous angle but with greater simplicity rest.



It is undoubtedly one of the most exceptional cloistered spaces not only in Spain, but in the whole of the West, despite having lost the roof and is currently presented as a ruin (restored, however).



Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer wrote one of his best known stories, the legend of El Monte de las Ánimas, based on the Knights and the places around them.



Curiosities



In 2006 a project was started to document the monument with a new technology developed on real-time 3D graphics engines and the most modern 3D scanning techniques. The project was called San Juan de Duero: Interactive Virtual Visit. The entire monument (cloister, church, capitals ...) was scanned and an exhaustive photographic session was subsequently carried out. With all this information, a three-dimensional model was generated that recreates a virtual visit with exceptional quality and accuracy. The project tries to be a source of documentation and conservation against possible deterioration that the monument may suffer. After two years, the project saw the light in early 2008.



The Centro de Estudios del Romaánico (CER) of the Santa María la Real Foundation launched, between November 3 and December 28, 2008, the Wonders of Spanish Romanesque contest to choose the seven buildings preferred by fans of this artistic style. After a first selection made by a team of experts, San Juan de Duero was in fourth place with 1706 votes, after San Isidoro de León, the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela and the Old Cathedral of Salamanca.

---