The Square behind you was known as the square of the silversmiths. Their stalls have filled these arcades since the Middle Ages, selling badges and trinkets to pilgrims, and silver is sold here still. Above them rises the one part of this cathedral that time did not erase. Every other medieval face of the church was torn down or rebuilt. This south doorway, the Praterías, carved in the twelfth century under Bishop Gelmírez, is the only Romanesque front that survived.
And it barely did. In the twelfth century the people of Compostela rose against Gelmírez and against Queen Urraca, and they set this very façade alight, along with the archbishop's palace beside it. Gelmírez slipped away in disguise. His brother was killed. The queen was pelted with stones in the streets. When the fury burned out, the shattered carvings were gathered up and fitted back into the wall wherever they would go, which is why the stone above the doors looks like a jigsaw assembled by someone who had lost the picture. I added numbers to the image to help you locate key areas easily.
Look at number one in the image, to the left above the angel with the trumpet. Among the rescued pieces, you will find Adam and Eve. They are being driven out of Eden, hunched and covering themselves, the instant that death first entered the world. Hold that thought, because death is about to appear again, a few feet away.
Now in the left doorway itself look at number two. In the center of the tympanum, Christ stands in the wilderness, ringed by demons, tempted and refusing to yield. And there, to the right side, number three in the image, sits a woman, half clothed, a human skull cradled in her lap. For centuries, pilgrims were told exactly who she was. The guidebook they carried, the Codex Calixtinus, named her an adulteress, condemned to hold the skull of her dead lover and kiss it twice a day, forever. That is the story. It is worth knowing that it is only a story.
The scholars who have studied her throw that tale out, and then they cannot agree on what is left. Some call her Eve. Some call her Lust itself. One recent reading names her Bathsheba. And if she is Eve, then the skull in her lap is no lover at all. It is the death she let into the world, the very thing you just watched carved a few feet to her left.
Remember, too, where you are standing. This porch was Gelmírez's courtroom, the place where he sat in judgment over the city. So the warning against sin, whatever her name, looked down directly on the spot where real judgment was passed.
Now continue standing where you are and listen to the next stop which is about the right portal.