Yuso has a spectacular library that has been preserved unaltered for centuries. A good number of files contain documents inserted in between pages. Fr. Olarte who undertook the project with funding from the Parliament of La Rioja said that the monastery has volumes of papers that were “disordered” and scattered in the archive, in adjacent offices, “and deposited even in baskets”.

The work was immense, explained Fr. Olarte: “The medieval part alone, which was the most studied and which we thought had 1,300 documents collected up to the year 1500, in reality had more than 1,800”. The oldest collection belonging to the year 759 is “a faithful copy of a document about the foundation of the monastery of the nuns of San Miguel de Pedroso, a municipality in Burgos, which was later included in the Becerro Galicano”, one of the most valuable medieval registry books.

Curiosities

Olarte acknowledged that in the beginning the documentation was a “bit numerous” and pointed out “curious” isolated cases like a copy of the “Becerro de Oña” of the XIV century. He explained later that most of the “notarized records are from the XVII century”; this consists of 36 volumes, each of which has an average of 400 pages. In his investigation Olarte found, some years ago, a document about the life of Gonzalo de Berceo and an unpublished manuscript of a work of Jovellanos.

And recently, continued Fr. Olarte, there “appeared more important things” like “the testament of Diego de Estuñiga, an important personality in the literature of the first half of the XV century” and “a letter of the conqueror of the Philippines, Miguel Gómez de Legazpi”, with donations and requests for Masses in order that “God may direct him to the right way”, in the words themselves of the founder of Manila.

Research

The work of documentation, once catalogued and regardless of whether or not they are edited, will remain in the archive of the Yuso Monastery and will be made available to all kinds of researcher. This is so because the person responsible for the project has found out that the documents “lend to further research in different fields, history, lexicography or theology”. There are “copies of the vows of San Millan in Sevilla, Extremadura, Murcia, Madrid and Castilla León”, where the Monastery had possessions during the medieval ages.

He also found a dictionary of the XVIII century in Tagalog (a primitive language of the Philippines) and “some 200 pages of Romance which are unknown at present because they have fallen into disuse”. Other discoveries include an original map of the mines of Pachuca in Mexico, signed by the secretary of the Spanish viceroy; books on asceticism, theology and monastic rights signed in the Holy See in the XV and XVI centuries.

Part of the find is an extended documentation of the disentail that developed in the Rioja monasteries – including those in Valvanera, Navarrete and Nájera – prepared by a parish priest of Estollo who also detailed the whereabouts and in whose hands the properties of the Church have ended.

XX Century

Having covered the end of the XIX century Fr. Olarte had to finish his work of cataloguing, but the documents continue, “there are more XX century records, and to analyze them means more immense work”, concluded the priest who, between cataloguing and annotating, was able to write some 3,000 pages.

Thus he ended his four-year project of cataloguing, ordering and conserving historical documents that testify to the historical evolution of the monasteries of San Millan de la Cogolla (the Visigoth structures of Suso and Yuso constructed en 1503), and declared as a patrimony of humanity by the UNESCO in 1997.

Preserved also are the extension of the properties of San Millan in the middle ages, its influence in many Spanish regions, and the importance of its scriptorium where one can find the first proofs of the Romance language and where Gonazalo de Berceo, the first poet in Spanish, worked.