The Romanesque Chapel Returned and Rebuilt was Irene’s first major achievement as mayor of San Esteban, reversing a long-running loss of local heritage. What began as a disputed monument’s return became something more intimate: while undergoing cancer treatment, Irene invested the chapel’s completion with the hope that she would survive to see it home, and later found comfort there while awaiting medical results.

Removal and Loss

In the 1950s, plans for a reservoir threatened to cover three villages near San Esteban. The authorities moved the dead from the cemeteries and dismantled two churches stone by stone so they could be relocated. A small Romanesque chapel was also supposed to be moved, but the reservoir was never built. The churches were returned; the chapel was not. It had disappeared from public view, and the community was left without an explanation for its absence.

The later account supplied a history of appropriation rather than simple administrative neglect. A minister under Franco had fallen in love with the chapel and taken it for his estate in Galicia. After Spain’s transition to democracy, people began calling for its return. Yet the village to which it had belonged was empty: its residents had either died or emigrated. Successive governments and mayors did not press the claim firmly, while the minister’s heirs resisted and ambiguous laws offered no clear means either to compel restitution or to punish those who kept it. The chapel’s absence thus persisted through a combination of political reluctance, legal uncertainty, and the disappearance of the community most directly associated with it.

Irene’s Campaign and the Return

Once sworn in as mayor, Irene decided that the chapel should come back to the region. She kept pursuing the matter and sought a new location that could satisfy everyone. The account presents the return as a practical achievement as well as a symbolic one: the chapel was brought back and its stones assembled again, reversing a removal that had outlasted the abandoned reservoir project and the community’s dispersal.

Irene’s campaign provoked hostile commentary. She kept framed an article by Anselmo, a right-wing journalist at El Diario Montañés, who cast the recovery as a provocation by leftists and objected to the chapel being taken from the Francoist heirs. The polemic reduced her effort to partisan mischief, while Irene described it in civic terms: the chapel was the people’s heritage, the residents wanted it back, and she had promised to govern for all of them. Her atheism made the campaign seem paradoxical to some observers, but her stated claim was not religious. It was about public ownership and a promise made to the community.

The return also illuminates the contested terrain of Irene’s local politics. San Esteban was divided over the biomass plant: Irene supported it as a source of clean energy, electricity, and employment, and rejected the accusation that backing development made her a traitor to Cantabria. Later, a television journalist attacked the project’s environmental and economic claims and confronted Irene with a revised agreement she had not known about. In a separate newspaper report, Pacheco presented allegations that Irene had threatened landowners with expropriation. These controversies do not explain the chapel’s recovery, but they sharpen the contrast in her public record: the mayor who championed an industrial project also fought to bring a piece of local history back. Her positions could be recast by opponents as betrayal or political manoeuvring; the chapel, for Irene, rested on the more immediate obligation to the people she represented.

A Private Meaning

The chapel’s return coincided with Irene’s cancer diagnosis, a fact she had never previously disclosed to Bea. She admitted that she might have pursued the restoration so fiercely because she believed, in some unspoken way, that nothing bad could happen to her before the chapel was back and every stone had been put in place. The project had become bound up with a hope that its completion could hold death at bay. This was not a public explanation she had used to justify the campaign; it was a private fear she shared only after the work had been done.

That disclosure changes the emotional meaning of the restoration without cancelling its civic purpose. Irene had acted for the town and because its residents wanted the chapel returned, but her struggle for it had also offered a personal bargain with uncertainty: if she could finish the work, perhaps she would be safe. Bea is struck by this rare, unguarded admission from her formidable older sister. Irene’s pride in the achievement exists alongside fear, not in place of it.

The Chapel as Refuge

Even after the successful return, the chapel continued to matter to Irene. When she was due to receive the results of periodic medical tests, she found it calming to enter and look through its small window at waves breaking against the rocks. She did not claim certainty about religious belief; she described the place as a balm and said she was proud that it had come back to the town. If its return offered even some of the same comfort to others that it gave her, she considered the struggle worthwhile.

The chapel therefore holds two connected kinds of significance. Its stones embody the recovery of heritage that political convenience and legal ambiguity had left displaced. At the same time, the restored building becomes a place where Irene can face the recurring uncertainty of illness. The account does not turn her into a believer: instead, it shows an atheist finding steadiness in a recovered monument, its small window, and the sea beyond it. The achievement that first established her as a mayor also becomes a setting in which she can acknowledge how frightened she is.