PILGRIM CEMETERY

With entrance from the cloister and linked to the funerary space of the crypt of Santa Leocadia, there is a small garden known as the “pilgrim cemetery”. It is a small piece of land that, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, belonged to the monastery of San Vicente, but with the expansion of the cathedral in the Gothic period and the subsequent construction of the ambulatory, it became part of the premises of the Sancta Ovetensis .

In the Xcentury, funerary use was reserved for the small porticoed space, attached to the north of the crypt and reserved for the bishops of the diocese, whose remains can be seen today. However, this garden was never a pilgrim cemetery as such, despite the fact that since the XV century the Cathedral was obliged to give dignified burial to pilgrims who died in the city. These burials took place in the neighboring San Juan Hospital and also in the rest of the city's hospitals. In 1588, the Statutes of Bishop Diego Aponte de Quiñones (1585-1598) again emphasized this issue and for this purpose a chapel was built in the Cathedral attached to this garden whose access was through Calle de San Vicente. This chapel was entered through a gate that gave way to a hallway from which one accessed the “pilgrim cemetery” to the left and the chapel, itself, to the right. Burials were carried out inside that chapel, on a dirt floor prepared for this purpose. This chapel, very deteriorated at the beginning of the XX century, was demolished in the 1930s.

In the pilgrim cemetery there is the centenary olive tree that, according to tradition, was brought from the Holy Land by a pilgrim.

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