Who hasn't got lost walking through a garden labyrinth? But it has not always been like this, over time the labyrinths have changed, not so much in their forms as in their meaning, from those that decorate the Gothic cathedrals of France, which symbolise the different steps that the Christian must take for his salvation, to those that decorate the gardens of the Renaissance, more related to love games than to divinity. Although there are references of labyrinths from Egypt to ancient Mesopotamia, where it took shape is in Greek mythology, and especially the Minoan culture of Crete 2800/1200 BC, and the Romans who drank so much from Greek culture, spread it throughout the Christian world. We find it both in the courtyards of Roman villas and on the floors of Gothic cathedrals, generally populated by frightening creatures and monsters such as the Minotaur, with the body of a man and the head of a bull. The Greek myth of the labyrinth has been explained in various ways, but essentially and briefly it is as follows: Parsifae, wife of King Minos of Crete, as a result of a zoophilic affair, gave birth to a being with the body of a man and the head of a bull. King Minos did not dare to kill him, thinking that he might be the son of a god, and asked Daedalus to build a labyrinth, so that Asterion (later known as Minotaur, the bull of Minos) could never come out. Every nine years and as an offering they brought several young men into the labyrinth to please the Monster. Among these young men was Theseus, who was in love with Ariadne (usually translated as "the much revered"), one of the daughters of King Minos. Theseus was determined to kill the Monster, which he succeeded in doing, but the real difficulty lay in getting out of the labyrinth. Ariadne gets Daedalus to tell her how to get out and Daedalus gives her a ball of thread to give to Theseus, so that she could develop it when he entered the labyrinth, thus guiding him on his return (although nowadays when a person has to get out of a complicated matter, they are told that they need a thread from Ariadne). In the 11th century labyrinths entered churches. The best known is on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France, in the centre of which was a bronze plaque depicting Theseus' struggle with the Minotaur; it was destroyed in the 18th century during the French Revolution, probably to make cannons. Some authors support that the labyrinths of the cathedrals served during the Middle Ages as a substitute ritual for the pilgrimage to both Jerusalem and Santiago, both for those in poor health and for penitents. It was not until the Renaissance that labyrinths were merged with gardens. If during the Middle Ages the mythological legacy survived disguised as Christian allegories, during the Renaissance its classical Greco-Roman legacy was recovered, giving it a more playful character and more suitable for the amorous games to which they were so fond during that period. The last remaining labyrinth from 18th century Spain is the Horta labyrinth in Barcelona, built by the Marquis Joan Antoni Desvalls, a mathematician and physicist. In the centre of the labyrinth there is a statue of Eros, and on the side a small temple dedicated to Ariadne.