San Pedro de la Mata

The ruins of S. Pedro de la Mata are located in the middle of the countryside, at about 3 km southwest of the village (pedanía) of Casalgordo, in the municipality of Sonseca (province of Toledo, Castile-La Mancha, Spain). The place can be reached by a dirt road starting west of the church of Casalgordo. Nowadays S. Pedro de la Mata is completely in ruins, but the original foundations of a church can be clearly seen because they are dig in a large and quite flat granite boulder embedded in the soil. Actually, S. Pedro de la Mata is a kind of semi-cave construction. Some fragments of walls and a couple of arches can also be seen, but it is uncertain whether they are original or not. Appears in some publications as San Pedro de Arisgotas or Casalgordo for nearby towns.

The present ruins are believed to originally correspond to the church of a monastery of those that grew, promoted by the nobility, around the capital city of the Visigoth kingdom of Toledo, similar to the case of Santa María de Melque not far from S. Pedro de la Mata. This origin allow us to date the first church between 589 (conversion of visigothic nobility to catholicism) and 711 (takeover of the visigothic kingdom by Muslim invasion).

In the close village (pedanía) of Arisgotas, municipality of Orgaz, there is a small visogothic "museum" that essentially consist on carved stones that were looted from S. Pedro and surroundings by the local inhabitants for use as construction materials. In the last years, many of this visigothic stones have been extracted from the walls of the village houses and deposited in the "museum".

Coordinates: 39°36′56″N 3°59′10″W / 39.61556°N 3.98611°W