A cave in the side of Mount Auseva where the Asturian chronicles set the victory of Pelagius around 722: a battle known only from sources written 160 years later, and a shrine of the Virgin with royal tombs, a chapel rebuilt after the fire of 1777 and a basilica completed in 1901.
Covadonga is a limestone cave in the side of Mount Auseva, above a spring of the river Deva, in a narrow valley of the Picos de Europa about ten kilometres east of Cangas de Onís in Asturias. Christian tradition places here the battle in which Pelagius of Asturias and his followers turned back an Umayyad force around 722, the victory later remembered as the beginning of the Kingdom of Asturias and of the Christian reconquest of Spain.
No source from the eighth century describes that battle; the story first appears in chronicles written at the Asturian court in the 880s. What the valley preserves is a shrine: a cave chapel of the Virgin, whom Asturians call the Santina, a monastery beside it, tombs that tradition assigns to Pelagius and his son-in-law Alfonso I, and a pink stone basilica completed in 1901.
The cave opens in a cliff partway up the valley wall, and water from inside the mountain falls from beneath it into a pool that feeds the Deva. Below the cave the valley narrows to a gorge, and above it the valley closes against the mountain, which is why the chroniclers could describe an army caught between the slopes with no room to deploy. Higher up lie the lakes of Enol and Ercina and the massif of Peña Santa, 2,596 metres high.
The name is old. The Rotensis, the earlier version of the Chronicle of Alfonso III, calls the place coba dominica, the cave of the Lady, and later medieval forms such as covadómnica and covadónnica lead to Covadonga. Some linguists prefer a Celtic origin, cova d'onnica, the cave of the spring, arguing that a dedication to the Virgin would have produced Covadominga in Asturian. If the traditional reading is right, the cave was already dedicated to Mary when the chronicle was written.
The Mozarabic Chronicle of 754, the only Christian history written in Spain within living memory of the Muslim conquest, says nothing of Pelagius or Covadonga. The story comes from two works of the Asturian court: the Chronica Albeldensia, finished in 881 and continued to 883, and the Chronicle of Alfonso III, compiled in the 880s. The latter survives in two versions, the plainer Rotensis and the polished ad Sebastianum, which makes Pelagius a sword-bearer of the last Visigothic kings. Both were written some 160 years after the events, for kings who claimed descent from him.
In their account the Berber governor Munuza, based at Gijón, sent Pelagius to Córdoba on an errand and married his sister in his absence. Pelagius fled to the mountains, and the governor of al-Andalus sent an army under Alqama, together with Oppas, a bishop who had gone over to the conquerors, to talk him into surrender. Pelagius answered from the cave that Christ would save Spain from that little mountain. The attackers' stones and arrows turned back on them, 124,000 died in the valley, and 63,000 more were crushed as they fled when a mountainside fell into the river at Cosgaya in Liébana. Oppas was captured, Alqama killed, and Munuza died soon afterwards fighting the Asturians.
These are miracle stories on biblical models, with numbers no army in eighth-century Spain could have fielded. The Arabic record is late and slight. Al-Maqqari, a North African scholar writing around 1630 from older Andalusi histories, tells of a rebel named Pelayo in the land the Arabs called Galicia, whose band dwindled to thirty men living on honey in the clefts of the rocks until the Muslims left them alone, asking what harm thirty wild asses could do.
Most historians accept that a rising in the Asturian mountains defeated a punitive expedition and that Pelagius led it; they disagree about nearly everything else. Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz dated the battle to 722, under the governor Anbasa, while Julia Montenegro and Arcadio del Castillo argue for 718, under al-Hurr. The Zaragoza medievalist José Luis Corral doubts that the battle took place at all and treats it as an invention of the chroniclers of Alfonso III, while Ignacio Ruiz de la Peña and Luis García Moreno see a real local victory that confirmed Pelagius as leader of an alliance of Visigothic refugees and Asturian nobles.
The historian Pedro Chalmeta noted that parts of the Covadonga story closely resemble the Chronicle of 754's account of a campaign in the Pyrenees, which raises the possibility that the Asturian writers borrowed from it. The succession that followed is better grounded: Pelagius ruled a small realm from Cangas de Onís until his death in 737, his son Favila succeeded him, and his son-in-law Alfonso I, king from 739 to 757, carried Asturian raids south into the Duero valley.
Asturian tradition records that Pelagius died at Cangas in 737 and was buried with his wife Gaudiosa in the church of Santa Eulalia at Abamia, where two empty sarcophagi are still shown. The belief that their remains were later moved to Covadonga comes from the sixteenth-century royal chronicler Ambrosio de Morales, who wrote that Alfonso X of Castile ordered the transfer; many historians doubt that it took place.
The cave now holds two tombs, one inscribed for Pelagius, Gaudiosa and a sister of the king, and one for Alfonso I and Pelagius's daughter Ermesinda. The chests and their inscriptions are post-medieval, and they mark where tradition, not archaeology, places the first kings of Asturias.
Later tradition credits Alfonso I with the first church in the cave, a wooden building with three altars to the Virgin, John the Baptist and Saint Andrew, given to Benedictine monks; no document of his reign confirms it. The monastery of San Pedro below the cave keeps parts of a Romanesque church with three stepped apses, the oldest standing fabric on the site, and the cult of the Virgin of the cave drew pilgrims from across Asturias.
Until 1777 the cave church was built of wood and hung from the rock above the waterfall. That year a fire destroyed it, the wooden lining of the cave and the old image of the Virgin. In 1778 the chapter of Oviedo cathedral gave the shrine a painted wooden Virgin and Child of the sixteenth century, which was kept in the nearby collegiate church until a new chapel was ready in the cave in 1820. The architect Ventura Rodríguez designed a large classical sanctuary to replace the lost church, but it was never built.
The nineteenth-century chapel seen in early photographs was replaced in the twentieth century by the present neo-Romanesque chapel of Luis Menéndez-Pidal, reached by 103 steps from the pool or through a tunnel in the rock. During the Spanish Civil War the image was hidden, taken to Paris and found in the Spanish embassy there in 1939, and it was back in the cave on 6 August that year.