Xenodochium of Mérida: bishop Masona’s hospital
The remains of the Mérida xenodochium, the pilgrims' hostel and hospital for the sick poor that bishop Masona had built in the 6th century, in the middle of the city's Visigothic period. It is one of the very few late antique charitable institutions in Spain identified on the ground, rather than a building deduced from texts alone.
- Type
- Xenodoquio visigodo
- Preservation
- Foundations
- Protection
- —
- Coordinates
- 38.92098, -6.33777
- Photographs
- 0
What it is and what is left
Its reason for being was the cult of Saint Eulalia. The martyr's tomb turned Mérida into a pilgrimage destination and made it necessary to provide the suburb growing around the basilica with somewhere to receive them: the xenodochium was raised precisely in that north-eastern sector, on the road by which pilgrims arrived, today the Santa Catalina neighbourhood. The episode is recorded in the Vitas Sanctorum Patrum Emeritensium, the fundamental literary source for Visigothic Mérida, which presents Masona as one of the city's most politically and religiously weighty bishops.
What survives are structures at foundation level, set into a landscaped public space with free access and no enclosure, beside the street that has taken its name from the monument. The immediate surroundings, between the basilica of Santa Eulalia, the San Lázaro aqueduct and the circus, are what best document the shift of the city's centre of gravity towards the Christian suburb in the 6th and 7th centuries. Part of the Archaeological Ensemble of Mérida, World Heritage (UNESCO, 1993).
What each period left here
It reads downwards: each band is a period with fabric in this site, newest first, deepest last.
6 facts
0 photographs
Late Antique / Visigothic
This site has fabric from this period. Mérida has 7 more sites built in the same layer.
See the whole layer →It is held to be the first documented hospital in Spain: not a generic house of charity, but an institution founded to care for the sick, the poor and pilgrims.
Turismo de Extremadura (Junta de Extremadura)The xenodochium was open to Jews, and Masona is said to have treated even pagans with kindness: a hostel with no conditions of creed in 6th-century Hispania.
Masona — WikipediaIt worked for some three hundred years. In the late 9th century, by then under Islamic rule, the old hostel was taken apart almost to its foundations: what you see today is what was left of that dismantling.
Masona — WikipediaHalf the hospital is under the railway: in the late 1990s a good part of it could be excavated archaeologically, but the rest lies under the ballast of the Mérida–Madrid line, and there it stays.
Pequeña Arqueología — Xenodoquio en MéridaThat excavation produced marble pilasters carved with vines and bunches of grapes: the eucharistic symbol, carved in the pilgrims' hostel.
Pequeña Arqueología — Xenodoquio en MéridaMasona founded it in the second half of the 6th century, in the reign of Leovigild: a Catholic bishop raising a hospital in the city of the Arian king.
Turismo Prerrománico — Xenodoquio de MéridaBelow the deepest layer of each site is the ground itself: what has not been excavated yet, or what left nothing built. The catalogue only claims what is documented.
A short walk from here
Straight-line distances, worked out from the coordinates of each site.
Where this page comes from
- Xenodoquio — Consorcio de la Ciudad Monumental de Mérida consorciomerida.org