Santa Maria del Campo Rus: where the poet Jorge Manrique died

A spacious, flat village of the Cuenca plains, in the Mancha country south of the provincial capital, Santa Maria del Campo Rus would be one more quiet farming town were it not for a single dramatic event that tied it forever to Spanish literature.

The death of a poet

In 1479 the soldier-poet Jorge Manrique, author of the celebrated Coplas on the death of his father, one of the masterpieces of Spanish verse, had his military camp in these fields while fighting for Isabella the Catholic. Mortally wounded in the assault on the nearby castle of Garcimunoz, he was carried to a noble house in the village, where he died days later; tradition holds that his last two verses were found, written on bloodstained papers, among his clothes. A striking monument of spiralling stone discs, the work of the sculptor Coullaut Valera, honours him, and the town hall houses a study centre devoted to his life and work.

The village today

Around the main square stand the parish church of the Asuncion and, nearby, the noble house linked to the poet's death, while on the edge of the village the ruins of an 18th-century Trinitarian convent and the garden-chapel of the Virgen del Amparo, once a field hospital, recall its past.

Getting there

Santa Maria del Campo Rus lies in the south of Cuenca province near San Clemente, about fifteen kilometres from the A-3 motorway between Madrid and Valencia.