Simeón Sentado by Francisco Leiro, 2007
Paseo de la Castellana
Madrid, September 2025
“Simeon wanted to be alone to meditate, but he was so rigorous in his methods that he was expelled from the monastery. To escape the world, he went to the desert and there looked for a dry cistern, but curiosity was aroused, and his fame drew hundreds of people to visit him. He also visited the cave where he later took refuge. Fed up with everything, he had a three-meter-high column built, but it wasn't enough. He asked for another seven-meter one, but that wasn't enough either. Finally, he got one seventeen meters high, which he climbed. According to legend, he spent thirty-seven years there, until he died in 459. He was known as Simon the Stylite, and his memory is commemorated on January 5th. Luis Buñuel made a film about him, Simon of the Desert (1965), a cinema classic. Buñuel didn't let him die on the column, but that's another story. This is ‘Simeón sentado’ (Simon Seated), a bronze sculpture on a granite column by Francisco Leiro, installed in 2007 at the Cuatro Torres in Madrid. Leiro, who has other sculptures in which the biblical and the classical interact with modernity, wanted to see here a distracted attitude in Simeon, evoking the Hellenistic Thorn-Bearer, but also Rodin's thinker. I said distracted, but I could say relaxed: is good old Simeon meditating, or has he been distracted by the flight of a butterfly? No matter how high you climb, the world will always call you back. There, next to it, is the Torre Emperador Castellana, formerly Torre Espacio, with its two hundred and thirty meters of height (the fourth tallest building in Spain) and many people perched on it. Are they meditating? The tower is also famous for the fire that broke out there while it was still under construction, in September 2006. Will Simeon think of this when he sees people staring curiously at him from above?” (Simeón sentado, La Acequia)
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