El Puig - the name simply means "the hill" - was a strategic prize. It rose between the Christian advance and the walls of Muslim Valencia, and whoever held it commanded the approach to the city. In August 1237 the forces of the Crown of Aragon, led by Bernat Guillem d'Entença, met the army of the Taifa of Valencia under Zayyan ibn Mardanish in the Battle of El Puig. The Aragonese victory was decisive. It cleared the last major obstacle before the capital, and the following year Valencia itself would fall to Jaume I. The king did not forget the hill that had made his conquest possible. He founded a sanctuary here, and had the buried Virgin enthroned as the patroness of his new Kingdom of Valencia.

The friar who found the image was no ordinary priest. Peter Nolasco had founded the Mercedarian order, a brotherhood with a startling and humane mission: to buy back Christian captives held in bondage across the Muslim Mediterranean, and, when money ran short, to offer themselves as hostages in the prisoners' place. Jaume I entrusted the new shrine on El Puig to Nolasco's Mercedarians, making them its guardians in perpetuity. It was a fitting match. An order devoted to freeing the captive took charge of a site that stood, in the mind of its age, for deliverance - and the little Byzantine Virgin became a magnet for the faithful of the whole kingdom.

The first church was finished by 1240, but it could not hold the crowds. Pilgrims poured toward the patroness of Valencia in such numbers that a far larger Gothic church replaced it around 1300, and in 1588 the great monastery that frames the complex today went up around it. Inside, the building keeps the memory of its royal founder close. Visitors pass through the cloisters into the Salón Real, the hall reserved for monarchs on their journeys to Valencia, and the Salón Gótic named for Jaume I himself, alongside a hall devoted to ceramics. Gothic below and Renaissance above, the monastery reads like a stone record of the centuries it took to build.

Not every century was kind to it. Since the 1800s the monastery has served many purposes beyond the religious, passing through uses that had little to do with pilgrims or prayer, as so many Spanish monasteries did after the era of dissolution. Yet it survived, and in 1969 it was formally protected as a national landmark - today classed as a Bien de Interés Cultural. The hill still holds its two intertwined stories: the battle that gave Jaume I his kingdom, and the buried Virgin who became its patroness. Nearly eight hundred years on, the faithful still climb El Puig to stand before the small stone image that a friar is said to have lifted from the earth.