A week after a Nile crocodile was allegedly spotted in a river in north-west Spain, the country’s waters have yielded an even more miraculous find in the mossy and somewhat eroded form of a granite statue of the Virgin Mary and child that could date from the 14th century.
The sculpture was discovered 11 days ago in the Sar River on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela by an angler looking for trout. What appeared to be a slimy rock at first sight could turn out to be a 700-year-old piece of Spanish religious history.
“I was out fishing when I tripped on a stone,” Fernando Brey told the Voz de Galicia newspaper.
“I noticed the stone was square – which is odd in a river – and then I looked at its lines, at the cape and at the shape of the head. And I said to myself: ‘There’s something here’.”
On Monday morning, the statue was taken from the river to be examined at the city’s Pilgrimage Museum.
A search for a 1.5-metre crocodile spotted in the Pisuerga River in the Castilla y León region was last week abandoned amid growing suspicions that the elusive creature was in fact an otter but the statue appears to be a genuine find. Initial investigations suggest the piece is carved in the local Galician gothic style and may once have decorated a wall.
“On both sides of the Virgin, by each of her shoulders, are two angels or putti,” the regional government of Galicia said in a statement. “They’re fairly worn away, but you can still make out each of their faces and a hand holding up an object or the Virgin’s own cape.”
The base of the sculpture is decorated with a four-petalled flower and interwoven acanthus leaves.
“The face of the Virgin is gone, as is the head of the child,” the statement added. “This is probably due to an old impact inflicted in an attempt to desanctify the piece.”
The Galician culture department said the “casual archaeological find” would be examined in the hope of discovering where the piece came from and how it ended up in a river.
“Studies should tell us whether this is a very valuable gothic statue,” Román Rodríguez, the minister for culture and tourism in the regional government, said during a visit to the site.
“But beyond its cultural and historic value, we’ll also need to try to put together the story of this statue: what happened, and how could it remain undiscovered so close to the city for so many centuries? It must be quite a story.”
