Irene Works to Return the Romanesque Chapel to Its Home

Irene’s campaign to return the Romanesque Chapel to its home restored a displaced piece of local heritage and became the first major success of her mayoralty. The recovery was both a public undertaking, justified by the community’s claim to its own patrimony, and a private source of reassurance for Irene during cancer treatment. Her eventual pride in the chapel’s return was inseparable from the fear she had invested in seeing the work completed.

The Chapel’s Removal and Loss

In the 1950s, plans for a reservoir threatened to cover three villages in the area. Their dead were transferred from local cemeteries, and two churches were dismantled stone by stone for relocation. A small Romanesque Chapel was also supposed to be moved several kilometres away. The reservoir was never built. The churches were returned, but the chapel disappeared from the community’s reach.

The explanation emerged later: a minister under Franco had fallen in love with the Romanesque building and taken it for his estate in Galicia. After Spain’s democratic transition began, people called for its return. Yet the chapel’s original village had emptied; its inhabitants had either died or emigrated. Earlier governments and mayors had little incentive to sustain the campaign, while the minister’s heirs resisted returning it. Ambiguous laws offered no clear protection to the village, leaving the chapel caught between a community’s historical claim and the advantage of those who possessed it.

Irene’s Mayoral Campaign

Upon taking office, Irene decided that the chapel should return to the region and persisted until she secured its recovery. The account emphasizes not only her resolve but also the practical need to find a new location acceptable to everyone. Its original village no longer had residents, so restoring it could not simply mean returning it to an intact community in its former setting. The recovered chapel was instead placed near the cliffs, where it became part of the living town’s landscape.

The campaign was politically contentious. Anselmo, a right-wing journalist writing for El Diario Montañés, framed Irene’s effort as an attack on respectable people and accused left-wing politicians of recovering churches for the same hostile purpose for which, in his account, their predecessors had burned them. Irene kept an article containing the attack. She understood that some people could not accept her taking the chapel from the Franco minister’s heirs, but argued that it belonged to the town’s heritage. She had promised to govern for all residents, and the residents wanted it back.

A Public Achievement and a Private Fear

Irene’s determination acquired a more intimate dimension because the campaign took place after her tumor was diagnosed. She had never told anyone, she later admitted, that she had become so committed to the chapel’s return partly because she felt that nothing bad could happen to her until it was back and every stone had been put in place. In that private bargain with uncertainty, completing the transfer became a condition for imagining that she would survive it.

The admission surprised Bea. Irene, usually forceful and rarely so openly vulnerable, had acted as though finishing the chapel’s return might keep death at bay. The revelation did not undo the public reasons for her campaign; it exposed the fear living alongside them. Irene was an atheist, and Bea had wondered how someone without religious belief could make the chapel her particular cause. Irene’s answer was civic rather than doctrinal: it was the town’s patrimony, and its people wanted it restored.

The Chapel After Its Return

The chapel remained a refuge for Irene even after the recovery was complete. When she went for periodic medical test results, she found comfort in entering the building and looking through its small window at waves breaking against the rocks. She did not claim certainty about belief in God; instead, she described the place as a balm and took pride in seeing it back in the town.

That use gave the recovered building a double life. Its return repaired a historical dispossession and affirmed Irene’s promise to represent the whole community, including a village whose former residents were gone. At the same time, the chapel offered her a place to contain fear when her own health was uncertain. Irene hoped that if the building did as much good for others as it did for her, the struggle to bring it home had been worthwhile. The campaign’s significance therefore rests both in its tangible result—the chapel restored to the region—and in the vulnerability that Irene had concealed within her determination.