No one quite knows for certain the exact origins of the monastery of Santa María la Real, but somehow a myth - in a falsified document that purports to "record" its foundation - got tangled up with it. Legend has it that during a hunt, a noble knight, Alpidio, discovered an abandoned church dedicated to Saint Peter and Saint Paul, and quickly alerted his brother, the abbot Opila, who restored and then took over the hermitage, which would eventually become the monastery of Santa María la Real (1). Fiction aside, it may be interesting to note the aristocratic and chivalric flavors that characterize this founding myth of a monastery in a town that would enjoy royal jurisdiction as well as become one of the Christian strongholds in the Reconquista campaign. The first authentic record of the monastery dates to 1020, which describes the establishment at the time as a lay abbey (abbatia secularis); we also have extant records from the same century of donations of lands and estates from nobles, which include King Alfonso VI of León and Castile (r. 1072-1109) who gave the church of Santa Eugenia de Cordovilla to Abbot Lecenio of Santa María la Real (2). In 1169, Alfonso VIII, King of Castile (r. 1158–1214) gave the monastery to Retuerta Abbey and the Premonstratensian order, putting the monastery in the former diocese of Burgos like other Premonstratesian abbeys (3).

Santa María la Real as it stands today dates mostly to the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth century, with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century restorations and additions (4). As such, the medieval portions of the church exhibit largely late Romanesque features, such as the many historiated and decorated capitals, with just a hint of the early Gothic, as evident in the slightly pointed arches and ribbed vaults such as in the cloister and the presbytery (5). José Luis Hernando Garrido, after Lacoste, proposes that three workshops, working in three successive phases, were involved in the medieval construction, with the oldest parts of the church dating back to the 1160s, and the final sections completed around the second and third decades of the thirteenth century, including the rebuilt cloister that reused older carvings from the Romanesque church (6).

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In 1871, most of the cloister capitals and some more from the church and other areas of the monastery were removed to the Museo Arqueológico Nacional (MAN) in Madrid, where they still reside today (7). Among these are capitals with vegetal motifs and fantastic creatures, scenes from Christ's life (including a double capital of the Massacre of the Innocents from the cloister that shares similarities with a capital in the church of Santa Cecilia), as well as an equestrian knight and a lion-fighter that is commonly identified as Samson (8). Explore the Descent from the Cross capital (now preserved in MAN) in details below.