San Martín Pinario

The monastery of San Martiño Pinario (San Martín Pinario in Castilian) is a Benedictine monastery in the city of Santiago de Compostela, Galicia, Spain. It is the second largest monastery in Spain after San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

Little remains of the original medieval buildings, as the monastery has been largely rebuilt since the sixteenth century. The monastery was closed in the nineteenth century in the Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizábal. The buildings currently house a seminary.

It originated in a chapel dedicated to Santa Maria called the Corticela which was demolished in the late ninth century, except the chapel, which today is part of the Cathedral of Santiago, when King Afonso III the Great and the bishop Sisnando began the new cathedral construction. Thus, around the year 899, this monastery was built where Benedictine monks moved from the old chapel. This monastery was later replaced by another monastery whose church was consecrated in 1102 by Bishop Diego Gelmírez, but not much remains of that era.

Throughout the Middle Ages the monastery grew so that by the end of the fifteenth century the monastery became the richest and most powerful of Galicia. This brought about the almost complete reconstruction starting in the sixteenth century. From that century it was the most powerful monastery in Galicia, administering control over most Galician monasteries.

The current church began to be erected soon after the appointment of Juan de Sanclemente Torquemada as Archbishop of Santiago in 1587. The project was commissioned to Mateo López, the most outstanding monastic architect of the city. After the death of López in 1606, Benito González de Araujo assumed the direction of the work.

The facade of the church, oriented to the west and open to the square of San Martín, presents a cover with structure of great altarpiece of stone divided in three bodies and three streets separated by fluted columns and is dedicated to the exaltation of the Virgin Mary and of The Benedictine order.

The fronton finish has a relief of Saint Martin on horseback distributing his coat with a poor, patron of the convent.

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Wikipedia