Monastery of San Ginés de la Jara, Cartagena, Spain, Photographer Pablo Camps, 2 October 2011, CCA-SA 3.0 Unported license. In an era when breathless headlines declare nearly every vase or statue with a shadowy past as “stolen,” it’s refreshing—if a bit ironic—to encounter a case where art was, in fact, stolen. In what appears to be a very “insider job,” sacred carvings, a bell, Roman columns, and a bearded bust of Simeon the Stylite were spirited away from the ancient Monastery of San Ginés de la Jara in El Beal, in Murcia in southern Spain. The monastery was originally founded during the Visigothic era. Its name honors a semi-mythic hermit Saint Genesius whose cult is associated with anchorites and hermits. The monastery remained a respected holy place even during Muslim rule in Spain.
Six people are now under investigation after Spanish Customs Surveillance Officers swooped in on various private homes in Murcia and Madrid, seizing objects taken from the 16th-century monastery. Among the recovered items is the 18th-century baroque image of San Ginés de la Jara – a work by noted sculptor Juan Pascual de Erocc – and a pair of baroque Solomonic columns with twisted, spiraling shafts that had flanked the altar of the Chapel of San Antonio.
Saint Ginés de La Jara (detail), about 1692, Luisa Roldán, sculptor, and Tomás de los Arcos, polychromer. Polychromed wood with glass eyes, Collection The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA.
In April 2022, officers recovered the monastery bell (rather conspicuously missing from its tower). Then, in a seaside villa in La Manga, they discovered a Roman column shaft of reddish travertine supporting a bust of 5th-century ascetic Simeon the Stylite, famed for living atop a pillar in the desert.
Digging deeper, investigators learned that more objects could be found in the Madrid homes of former owners of the monastery – individuals with privileged access to its artworks. There, they found the polychrome image of San Ginés de la Jara in January 2025. San Ginés has been Cartagena’s patron since 1677.
The recovered objects are now housed at the Municipal Archaeological Museum of Cartagena, awaiting judicial proceedings.
The operation was a model of institutional cooperation, with the Historical Heritage Service of the Region of Murcia, the Culture Department of Cartagena, the Ministry of Culture, and the Customs Surveillance Service all working in tandem under the guidance of Investigative Court No. 4 of Cartagena. The action received support under the EU’s EMPACT program on combating organized international crime.
