Monasterio de la Santa Faz

The Monasterio de la Santa Faz stands about five kilometres from the centre of Alicante, in the district that takes its name from the monastery. The first convent and church, dedicated to Saint Veronica, were founded between 1489 and 1490; the Baroque building seen today is the result of a rebuild that ran from 1748 to 1785.

The relic

The devotion traces back to the 15th century, when the priest Pedro Mena, from San Juan de Alicante, travelled to Rome and was given a cloth bearing the face of Christ, credited by tradition with having saved Venice from the plague. Popular belief holds it to be the veil Veronica used to wipe Christ's face on the way to Calvary, and it is kept in an octagonal camarín behind the main altarpiece, built specifically to house and protect it.

The pilgrimage

Every year, on the second Thursday after Easter Sunday, the Romería de la Peregrina takes place, with hundreds of thousands of people walking from the Co-Cathedral of San Nicolás to the monastery. By number of participants it is Spain's second-largest pilgrimage after El Rocío, and it grew out of older rogativas, prayer processions that carried the relic into the city to ask for rain or the end of epidemics.

Visiting

The church façade, built in ashlar stone, is topped with three pinnacles and Solomonic columns typical of Baroque taste. The convent grounds also hold a defensive tower from 1582, square in plan with corner turrets, built when this farmland needed protection from Barbary raids. Outside the pilgrimage, the monastery sees far fewer visitors than the churches in the city centre, which makes for an unhurried visit and time to linger at the camarín without the large crowds that fill the site on the main pilgrimage day each spring.