Seville is always a strange and mysterious place with its morbid fascination with death, but never more so than in December when one of the oddest celebrations of all takes place.

On December 2nd the people of Seville turn up in their hundreds at the Saint Inés Monastery to gaze upon the uncorrupted face of María Coronel. Nothing remarkable in that you might think, except that she died in the 13th century. She was buried in the cemetery of the monastery which she founded, with as far as I know no embalming and yet there she is seven centuries later, slightly wizened it must be said, but serene in her glass tomb, looking as if all those years had not passed.

The story as it is told is that her husband was beheaded by King Pedro 1, his house destroyed and the land spread with salt so that nothing could grow as a warning to traitors. After some time the king met María Coronel, fell helplessly in love and pursued her incessantly. She rejected his advances and on one occasion fled to her parents' house. As the king entered through one door to the house, she escaped out the back, ran through the streets of Seville and begged for refuge in a convent. (A weel trooden path in those days): Anyway the nuns hid her in a ditch in the garden and covered her with earth. Miraculously, the nuns later said, flowers immediately sprang up over the earth and when the king rushed around searching for her, he was of course unable to find her.

Some days later when María was living quietly in the convent, the king having received a tip-off regarding her whereabouts, arrived unexpectedly. He chased her around the cloisters, along the corridors, up and down stairs, into every nook and cranny until she finally ran into the kitchens where she picked up a pot of boiling oil and poured it over her face in an attempt to cool his ardour. Perhaps they only had wooden spoons in those days. However it had the desired effect because when the king entered and saw the object of his lust terribly disfigured and bleeding profusely, he immediately left disconsolate and full of repentance.

To cut an increasingly long story short, he ordered the nuns to look after her, begged forgiveness and when María asked him to return the land of her husband's house so that she could found a monastery, he readily agreed. She was the prioress of 'her' monastery for many years and when she died she was buried in the chancel where she remained until the 16th century. Then during some renovation work her coffin was found and upon opening it, her perfectly preserved body was exposed for all to see. The nuns ever on the look out for miracles then put the body in a glass tomb where once a year until today at the end of the 20th century she can still be seen, scars and all.

There's a moral in there somewhere, but don't ask an incorrigible sinner what it is.

December 1998