At last we found ourselves approaching the famous _Colegiata de Sar_, a little old church in a green field formed by a bend in the river. The church itself was surrounded by modern buildings, and looked remarkably insignificant in consideration of the fact that it had recently been proclaimed a “National Monument.” Its outer walls were almost hidden by elliptical arches or arched buttresses, but its fine Romanesque apse was still unenclosed, though the windows had been blocked up. To enter the lateral door on the north side we had to pass through the parish cemetery. The church of _Santa Maria de Sar_ is rectangular in form and the walls and windows are Romanesque, while most of the present vaulting, added in the fifteenth century, is Gothic. There are eight square piers, four on either side of the central nave, each ornamented with elegant Byzantine shafts, supporting the toral arches which divide the church into three vaulted naves; at the end of each nave is an apse. “As we enter the church, our first impulse,” says Sanchez, “is to [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE COLEGIATA DE SAR, SANTIAGO] [Illustration: CLOISTER OF THE COLEGIATA DE SAR, SANTIAGO] draw back precipitately. The pillars appear to be bulging, the arches are about to crash to the ground, the beautiful columns are reeling upon their bases, the walls are tottering and about to crumble, and the roof is just going to fall with a crash. Is it an earthquake, or are we seized by sudden giddiness?” Neither the one nor the other; the whole thing is an illusion--a complete illusion. And when the traveller has overcome his first surprise, he is struck with wonder at this marvellous feat of architecture, and his thoughts are carried to Pisa or to Bologna. “But are you sure that these slanting walls and their sloping columns have always been awry like this?” we ask. “Yes,” reply the archæologists and the architects who have visited Sar during the nineteenth century, including such authorities as Lopez Ferreiro and Fernandez Sanchez. “For seven and a half centuries this building has stood thus. Thirty generations of men have come to gaze at it, and we still marvel at the temerity of the man who designed it. If,” they say, “this had all been the effect of sinking ground and not the result of calculation, how could the church have remained thus intact? Would it not in that case have fallen in ruins long ago?”