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A cliff rose steeply, and on its summit ancient hermits had built, stone by stone, a small church. Seen from afar, it could scarcely be told apart from the granite mass itself. Up close, it looked more like an animal shelter, with a cross perched upon its roof.
Soeiro Ramires — falconer, or perhaps goldsmith, or tailor, or even royal furrier, depending on the version that has reached us — was afflicted with the dreadful disease of leprosy, and found in that rough and holy heap of stones his hiding place. Not only to die there, but because he was fleeing justice. His crime was to have maintained relations deemed against nature with another man. Leprosy and guilt pursued him without mercy.
It was in the time of the first kings of Portugal. Afonso, son of Sanches and grandson of Afonso, was himself dying as a leper. Other monarchs of Christendom had suffered, and would yet suffer, from the same affliction. He, Soeiro Ramires, was seized by a single thought: to climb — to climb as high as he could, before it was too late — to a solitary place where the mercy of Our Saviour might find him sooner than wretched human judgement, and there to await, if not the healing of the flesh, then the absolution of the soul.
At the top of the cliff, where the pinewoods hide themselves in the mist, he dismounted and settled as best he could. He lit a fire, wrapped himself in a thick blanket, ate bread and prayed.
“Love chooses us,” he thought. “With this great sin of loving I have offended the Creator, who has thus defiled my face, my hands, my arms and all my body.”
The cold spread its white cloak all around. Great falls of snow plunged from the sky and made the Beira mountains gleam, from their foothills to the sharp bones of their peaks. Shivering, the wretch gathered what firewood he could and set it alight.
One night, a great star streaked across the horizon from end to end, falling in luminous ash upon his head. Soeiro Ramires marvelled greatly. Not only did the trembling and itching of the flesh cease to torment him, but a profound peace — a sense of rebirth and inexplicable lightness — lifted him from the vileness of the world.
It is said that the disease left him as mysteriously as it had come. Ramires devoted himself to the religious life, becoming one of the first Franciscans to profess in the kingdom. A temple of considerable size was later built on the site of the primitive one: the Church of Saint Francis, Saint Sebastian and the Nativity.
Today, little frequented and almost abandoned, it remains a place to which desperate believers still make their way, in search of a miracle and of redemption.
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