Arenal

Arenal is a Seville district in which the struggle over Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas acquires both a political address and a physical setting. Here Pencho Gavira has a senior office and a place at Octavio Machuca’s table; nearby, the church’s deaths and the old port’s riverfront become part of Lorenzo Quart’s investigation. The district links commercial power, parish survival, and the city’s uneasy passage between its inherited past and its redevelopment.

Offices, Influence, and the Church Project

Machuca tells Gavira that the bank’s councillors are growing impatient as the debate on Gavira’s church project approaches. Gavira expects the vote to follow the arrival of Saudi investors from Sun Qafer Alley and their purchase of Puerto Targa: with that agreement signed, he anticipates little opposition. The sequence makes the church proposal part of a larger commercial calculation rather than an isolated local matter.

Machuca’s account of Gavira’s position in Arenal is pointedly personal. Gavira has an office on the building’s principal floor and a seat beside Machuca because Machuca gave him the office and ceded him the seat. The setting makes their alliance visible while preserving its imbalance: Gavira’s access and status remain favors granted by the banker, even as Gavira presses forward with his own plans.

A District of Competing Accounts

The church’s threatened demolition is constrained by an old privilege: Mass must be celebrated each Thursday for the soul of Gaspar Bruner de Lebrija, the church’s benefactor. Macarena explains that the service is held at eight in the morning, the hour attached to his death in 1709. Each Thursday, an emissary of the archbishop and a notary paid by Gavira watch from the back pews for a mistake or omission that might invalidate the protection. The district’s redevelopment struggle thus turns on a small, repeated observance, scrutinized by representatives of both ecclesiastical and commercial authority.

The stakes are not merely procedural for Macarena. The parish has little money: the priest’s salary is small, the Sunday collection barely covers candle wax, and the restoration work is difficult to continue. She fears that, if Father Óscar leaves, someone may act against Father Príamo, whose Thursday Mass helps keep the church from the demolition that would benefit the archbishop and Banco Cartujano. A local rite becomes a fragile defense of a building and the community attached to it.

Streets, River, and Investigation

Arenal is also a route through the city’s physical history. Walking toward the Reales Alcázares, Macarena and Quart pass beneath the open arch by the wall; later they reach the river near the old Arab tower called the Tower of Gold, descending toward the Guadalquivir docks. The movement from streets and walls to the waterfront gives the district a layered geography, where old structures frame the present-day investigation.

Quart’s work in Seville ranges across that same contested terrain. He is charged with identifying the author of a letter and maintaining discreet contact with the local church authorities; he also has to assess the church deaths, pursue the identity of the hacker Vísperas, and follow the mystery of a postcard associated with Carlota Bruner. Arenal’s commercial and riverfront settings therefore sit alongside the parish and the Archbishop’s Palace as parts of one inquiry, without resolving its separate questions.

Deaths and Material Evidence

The deaths associated with the church enter Arenal’s story first through competing explanations. Archbishop Corvo describes municipal architect Peñuelas’s fall as an accident: while inspecting the church’s ruin, Peñuelas—who had quarrelled with Father Ferro—fell when a wooden scaffold railing gave way, and landed on a partly assembled metal pipe. Another official and Father Óscar were present; the vicar administered the last rites. Later, police subcommissioner Simeón Navajo offers a similarly accidental account of Father Urbizu’s death: a scaffold shifted, dislodging a heavy piece of plaster from the cornice, which fell on him. These reports make mischance the official explanation, while leaving the church’s unusual succession of deaths in view.

When Honorato Bonafé is found dead in a confessional, Navajo reconstructs a different sequence. He believes Bonafé had climbed the altar scaffold beside the Virgin’s image and that Father Ferro climbed up after him. The two may have argued or struggled; Bonafé fell, or was pushed, from about five metres, injuring his hand as he tried to catch a scaffold bolt. Still alive, he dragged himself to the nearby confessional and died there. The account is a police reconstruction, not a witnessed event, and Navajo acknowledges that the exact confrontation remains uncertain.

Navajo’s proposed motive connects the death to the church’s finances and the Virgin’s pearls. His inquiry indicates that the original pearls had been replaced months earlier by twenty imitations. Clues point to Madrid dealer Francisco Montegrifo as a possible intermediary in circulating Captain Xaloc’s pearls, though the police cannot prove his role. A police informant’s date for the pearls’ circulation coincides with renewed restoration work; suppliers say the materials and rented machinery exceeded what Father Ferro’s salary and the church collection could afford. Navajo reasons that Bonafé discovered the substitution and confronted Ferro, perhaps attempting blackmail, but the precise circumstances of the killing remain an inference. Arenal’s church controversy is thus tied to a chain of uncertain transactions as well as to the visible pressure to redevelop the site.