How de Holy Grail ended up in O Cebreiro, Galicia

Abstract

A modern legend says that the Holy Grail was hidden in O Cebreiro in Galicia. I came upon a possible explanation for it in the course of research into Saint Gerald of Aurillac, a French saint of the tenth century. There was in the Middle Ages a monastic priory dedicated to him there, later abandoned. A miracle was recorded as having happened there, in which a priest, not convinced about transsubstantiation, saw the ritual bread and wine transformed into flesh and blood. When Saint Gerald was mentioned to pilgrims passing through O Cebreiro, they confused his name –Sant Gral in Galician–with the chalice of the miracle and misidentified it as the Holy Grail-Sant Grial in Galician. The legend was elaborated by Ramón Cabanillas, a modern Galician poet, in a nostalgic manner that recalls Saint Gerald and his medieval biographers: a mix of religious devotion with a martial code.