“[…] he saw again the face of the woman walled in the Casa de las Torres and her eyes hallucinated by darkness and death, he saw his grandfather Manuel dressed in the uniform of the Assault Guard and thought that it was time to return to Mágina […]” Antonio Muñoz Molina. The Polish Horseman.

In this place, the return of San Juan de la Cruz's body to Úbeda was unsuccessfully managed. His mortal remains were stealthily stolen two years after his death, during midnight, before the city noticed the theft and he was taken to Segovia. Although the furtive operation was observed by a neighbor on the street, the bricklayer Salvador Quesada, who, out of fear or for any other reason, did not give notice until the next day. It is also interesting to know that Cervantes lived for a time in Úbeda, so he must have known the news, since he later immortalized it in chapter XIX of the first part of Don Quixote, where the famous hidalgo engages in one of his adventures against “up to twenty encamisados”, who carry a coffin to Segovia, although they indicate that they come from Úbeda. In any case, the city of Úbeda did not resign itself to the plunder and filed a lawsuit with Segovia. From the old town hall houses, in February 1596, the request for the return of the venerated body of the Saint to Pope Clement VIII was approved, who issued his Apostolic Brief “Expositum nobis fuit” in which he recognized the rights of Úbeda and ordered the restitution of the body to where it was first buried. As is known, Segovia did not provide the body and Úbeda, after the long and noisy lawsuit, in 1607 managed to recover part of the relics of the Carmelite reformer, a finger and a tibia, which were found in the Museo de San Juan de la Cruz.

(…) In a serene square, which has an elegant but mutilated and dismantled palace, a graceful altar with rag flowers next to the aristocratic seriousness of a triumphal arch with a warrior air, and a fountain with lions blurred in the stone (…) The Plaza del Populo was one of the most important squares in Baeza, which housed the main public buildings. In this square were located institutions such as the Old Butcher Shops - current headquarters of the courts -, the Civil Court and Public Notary Office or Casa del Pópulo - current Tourist Office -, the Arco de Villalar, the Puerta de Jaén or the Fuente de los Leones, named after the ornamental elements in the shape of a lion through which the water gushed and which apparently come from the Ibero-Roman ruins of Cástulo, which today is in questionable, because for experts in Iberian sculpture its carving in siliceous stone and its formal appearance suggest a much more modern chronology.

This story does not escape the investigation of Juan Eslava Galán, who implements it in his work Los Templarios y la Mesa de Salomón and whose chapter is ingeniously titled: The Virgin who walked through Jaén. (…) The seven astonished witnesses of the miracle contemplated a ghostly procession descending down Maestra del Arrabal de San Ildefonso street, in the neighborhood outside the walls of the medieval city. (…) The Templars and Solomon's Table. Chapter 9. What links this temple to the figure of the poet Miguel Hernández is that the damage caused by shrapnel can still be seen on the façade and it is an excellent place to contextualize why Miguel Hernández came to Jaén.