Sometimes, the simplest is what interest and expectation produces in the mind of the viewer.

Who wants to know the origins of Ciudad Real, has to travel, approximately eight kilometers beyond its urban center and visit, even be overwhelmed by a nostalgic curiosity, the ruins of what was the citadel of Alarcos and one of the most sounded defeats that the Almohads of the emir Al-Mansur inflicted on the trusting Christian troops of King Alfonso VIII.

They will not see, except for some ruins that melancholically sit on a hillside, they hear impassively, there, in the distance, the plaintive song of jackdaws and crows, that perhaps they miss the place where the little Celtiberian temple once stood.

But if your visit coincides with that special moment, in which the afternoon is declining, the sun's way to your milk of dolphins and algae in the Finis Terrae, you can see with your own eyes, inside the hermitage dedicated to the figure of the Virgin of Alarcos, part of those 'special effects' that the medieval stonemasons applied in many of their constructions.

And in a way so gratifyingly simple, you can see reflected the filigree of the rosette, located towards the west, like mariposillas of pristine iridescence, ascending through the image of a Virgin, who with the tenderness of a true Mother, keeps her Son in arms.

NOTICE: Both the text and the photographs that accompany it are my exclusive intellectual property.