📜 LEGEND · EXP. Nº3657
ACTIVE
The Cave of Salamanca
The Cave of Salamanca is a legend from Salamanca, Castilla y León, ES — a folk story passed down over generations. This file collects its origins, its meaning and how it has been retold.
Where does the legend of The Cave of Salamanca come from?
- Location
- Salamanca, Castilla y León, ES
- Kind of legend
- Myth
- Coordinates
- 40.965, -5.668
- Testimonies
- 0
- Last updated
LOCATION
What is the legend of The Cave of Salamanca?
Beneath the church of Santo Tomás in Salamanca lies a crypt that popular legend transformed, from the Middle Ages onward, into a secret school of magic and necromancy supposedly run by the Devil himself. According to the tale, seven students at a time would enrol to learn the black arts, on the condition that the last one to leave each year would pay tuition with his own soul, or at least his shadow. The legend is most often tied to Enrique de Villena, a real 15th-century nobleman and scholar whose wide learning and interest in astrology scandalized his contemporaries enough that, after his death, the Church allegedly burned part of his library as suspect. Storytellers say Villena himself studied in the cave and was the one student clever enough to trick the Devil: he let another unlucky classmate leave last, so that man 'se quedó sin sombra' ('was left without a shadow') forever, marked from then on as someone who had learned sorcery underground. Whether the cave ever hosted actual classes or only rumor, Salamanca's university city, the oldest in Spain, still points visitors to the closed-off cueva as the supposed birthplace of Spanish black magic.
📎 Source: Enigma Atlas
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