Dona Isabel de Aragão

(1271-1336)

It was popularly known as Queen Santa Isabel, having been beatified and later canonized.

The Miracle of the Roses is the legend that comes to give the name to the Queen of Queen Santa Isabel. According to legend, the queen leaves Sabugal Castle on a winter morning to distribute bread to the most disadvantaged, surprised by the sovereign, who asks her where she went and what she carried in her lap, the queen would have exclaimed: They are roses, Lord! São Rosas. Suspicious, D. Dinis replies: Roses, in January?

D. Isabel then exposes the contents of the lap of her dress and from it only roses fall, instead of the bread that the Queen took in the sneaks of the King.

The first written record of the miracle of roses is found in the Chronicle of the Friars Minor.

D. Isabel would have been an extremely pious queen, where much of her time was dedicated to prayer and to helping the most disadvantaged.

Due to her extreme dedication, the queen still alive began to enjoy a reputation as a saint, having been beatified by Pope Leo X in 1516, being canonized in 1742 by Pope Benedict XIV.

Her tomb is today in the Convent of Santa Clara-a-Nova, a convent in Coimbra, where the Queen wore the habit of the Order of the Poor Clares, an Order to which she dedicated herself in the last years of her life.