Felix

Venerable Felix was a hermit of eighth-⁠century Spain who lived the ascetic life with his brother Votus in the Pyrenees near Jaca, in Aragon. The place of their struggle later became the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, the most important monastery of Aragon in the early Middle Ages. He is commemorated on 29 May, together with Votus and the hermit John.

Felix and Votus were brothers from Saragossa, then under Moorish rule. Local tradition tells that Votus, a young nobleman, was hunting in the mountains near Jaca and, chasing a stag, fell with his horse over a precipice of Mount Pano yet reached the bottom unharmed. There he found a cave with a small chapel dedicated to Saint John the Baptist and, inside it, the unburied body of the hermit John of Atarés, who had lived his ascetic life in that place.

Votus buried the hermit, returned to Saragossa, sold his possessions and told his brother what had happened. Then the two brothers withdrew to the cave and lived there as hermits, beneath the huge rock (in Spanish peña) that gave the place its name. According to another form of the tradition, kept in the Orthodox calendars of Western saints, John was still alive when the brothers came, and the three lived together and reposed at about the same time, around the middle of the eighth century.

From their community grew the monastery of San Juan de la Peña, which later received the Benedictine rule and became the burial place of many kings of Aragon. Aragonese tradition also links the beginnings of the kingdom with this place. Historians regard the story of the foundation as legend, yet the memory of the two brothers has been kept there without interruption.

Venerable Felix is commemorated on 29 May, together with his brother Votus and John the hermit.