From Roman times until the 11th century, Puente la Reina was a humble commercial crossroad, where anything rarely happened. Suddenly when the Camino boomed, hundreds of pilgrims arrived daily. Queen Muniadona, wife of King Sancho III, commissioned the construction of the bridge so pilgrims could cross the Arga river. This impressive bridge is the one that gives name to the village, because Puente la Reina means “The Queen’s Bridge”.
Puente la Reina is considered the best Romanesque bridge in Spain. This majestic bridge served as a defensive silent guardian of the village and had three towers. Unfortunately, only part of one of them is still standing. We can see six of the seven arches that were constructed, the seventh one is hidden under the first house of the village. In springtime, the Arga river brings a lot of the melted snow from the Pyrenees, which is why they had to construct extra holes in the bridge, so the pressure of the water would not destroy it.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.