Yet another imprudent fix in a land plagued by vigilante handymen led to angry calls to find the culprit — and to a soul-searching question: Does Spain just have too much history in need of upkeep?
[I]n November, Mayor Enrique Seoane noticed something that gave him a shock and caused a scandal in Spain.1
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It could be said that the problem of Castronuño is the problem of Spain: This ancient land just has too many old things in need of fixing. There are Phoenician forts, Celtic castles, Moorish minarets, Roman ramparts, granite Greek graves — all left by bygone civilizations that came here conquering, all bent on leaving something for posterity.
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- 1. In a photo taken by one of his neighbors, Mr. Seoane spied a seam of very modern cement that someone had poured into a decidedly ancient archway. It was an apparent homemade repair job to keep the church’s eastern flank from falling in. The work was done by an unknown “masked restorer,” the mayor told a local journalist in a story that soon spread across Spain. While this might conjure visions of a superhero secretly coming to the aid of an aging church, that is not how the mayor’s words played in Spain. Instead, they stirred up bad memories in a country whose small towns and villages had been scarred before by the eyesores these sort of vigilante repair efforts leave behind.
