The Hospital Mater Dei of Tordesillas was founded in 1467 to care for the sick and the poor. It stands on a narrow street, its outer wall a patchwork of old stone, brick, and crumbling plaster. A rusted gate at the entrance to the courtyard is covered by disintegrating sheets of particleboard. Through the gaps, the overgrown courtyard is visible—the cloister, the stone columns supporting the second floor, the weathered and broken casements hanging loose on a hinge, the general destitution. What happened here? An ancient fire, a restoration, and the various vicissitudes of more than five centuries. The information plaque on the outside wall—the only thing not decrepit, broken, or patched—identifies the hospital as a consolidated ruin.
The founder, Beatriz of Portugal, whose coat of arms still appears in several of the hospital’s rooms, was the daughter of an illegitimate king. She nevertheless used the title “princess” and consorted with Spanish royalty. Beatriz died in 1470, only three years after the hospital’s completion. She knew, it is said, that a good stone sculpture can save a name from oblivion; at her request, her body was interred at the hospital’s church in a sepulcher decorated with heraldic emblems and Portugal’s coat of arms.
Before her death, Beatriz selected a governor to run the institution, and patronage of the hospital stayed in his family for more than a century. In 1550, the governor’s son, Francisco Vázquez, engaged the renowned Corral de Villalpando brothers—Jerónimo, an architect, and Juan, a sculptor in plaster—to rebuild the church after the fire. They did so in the Gothic style, adding ribbed vaults, four- and six-pointed stars, semicircular arches, ogee arches, suspended ceiling bosses, and other decorative mounding. Vázquez paid the brothers 800 gold ducats. That splendid construction is now an entry in Lista Roja, a catalogue of culturally significant buildings in danger of destruction.
In 1992, the wood-panel-and-gold-leaf altarpiece was removed from the church and taken to the Santiago de la Espada church, in a village of Toledo, to replace the original altarpiece of that temple, destroyed in the Civil War. There it remains, safe. At that time, Hospital Mater Dei was already deteriorating, and soon enough, the neglected buildings were abandoned. Graffiti covered the interior walls. Broken furniture littered the rooms. A wall collapsed. All this you can see in the photos from a 2017 study of the building’s condition, published online.
Such dilapidation. Who allowed it to happen? Readers of the report expressed outrage. Several of them were residents of Tordesillas, and one was born across the street. They remembered the church in glorious condition. Think of it: for 500 years, the associated buildings had endured. Then, within just decades, everything fell into ruin. One more historic building that has been lost, lamented one commenter.
The afternoon that I stood outside its walls, the hospital was locked up. It seemed unlikely that any visitors would be allowed inside, among the rubbish and rubble. I had to settle for the photographs I found online of the church’s interior as it appeared in the 1950s. I compared them with images of the same vaulted chambers 50 years later. What a contrast. One set of images showed a sumptuous church with ornate decoration; the other showed only bare walls, an empty nave, and the blank spot with the outline of the missing altarpiece.
Despite the state of the hospital and church, the empty lofted nave seemed beautiful. I would like to see it. Not to deplore again the destitution, not to reflect once more on the speed of destruction, but to wonder at the enduring loveliness of the ceilings, not brilliantly white as in former times but bleached, like old bones. The bosses and the ribbed vaulted ceilings are largely intact, as if hovering all this time above the fray, looking down upon it, not passing judgement, just quietly present. Waiting, perhaps, for better times. Or simply waiting.
