The two deaths during the restoration of Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas—those of Father Urbizu and the municipal architect—turn a dispute over a neglected church into a question of accident, possible violence, and meaning. Both deaths are officially treated as accidents, but their setting, amid a stalled restoration and competing claims about the building’s safety, makes them difficult to separate from the church’s precarious future.

Background: a church under dispute

The restoration had been under way for two years under Gris Marsala, an American architect working for the Eurnekian Foundation, which had contributed one third of the project’s original funding. Of the three architects initially involved, she was the only one left; delayed approvals and missing funds had brought the work nearly to a halt. In this setting, the deaths became part of the church’s story almost as soon as Gris disclosed them to Lorenzo Quart.

The building was three centuries old. Gris regarded that age as grounds for historical protection, while the church’s critics invoked its deterioration to justify demolition. She argued that the description of the structure as unsafe was misleading: it had been neglected for a century and a half, but its walls and vault had no irreparable cracks. Most of the damage, she said, was to surface finishes, caused by damp entering through defective roofs.

The fatal accident at the church

Father Urbizu died after a piece of the church’s cornice fell on him. Gris pointed out the nearly one-metre gap left in the cornice above the pulpit, roughly ten metres above the nave. When Quart later examined the site, he reconstructed the lethal fall: about ten kilos of plaster had dropped from that height. The scaffolding provided room for someone to have dislodged it, but the police report rejected that possibility.

Gris’s account of the repair work gave the accident a material context without proving deliberate action. The roof coverings had been repaired with lime, cement, and sand; nearly ten tonnes of material had been carried up to a height of fifteen metres. She had done the work herself, alongside Father Óscar, using her calloused hands. The building was old and damaged, but she insisted it was not a ruin—and treated Urbizu’s death as a terrible accident rather than evidence that the structure was beyond repair.

The municipal architect’s death and the investigation

The other death was that of the municipal architect, who slipped on the roof. Quart noted that this fall had occurred in front of witnesses. Along with the police assessment of the falling plaster, that testimony led him to conclude that human intervention had not been established in either death. The possibility that someone could have caused the cornice fragment to fall remained physically conceivable, but the investigation did not support it.

The police treated both cases as accidents. Simeón Navajo explained that his superiors would permit informal cooperation but did not want to become involved in a matter entangling churches, priests, and Rome. A concrete crime within his jurisdiction would be different; neither death had been classified as one. The institutional response thus left Quart with a boundary as well as a finding: suspicion alone could not turn the deaths into criminal cases.

Meaning, faith, and the church’s survival

The deaths acquire a second meaning in the arguments over the church. Father Ferro describes human life as ending in death, often without any lasting memory, and recalls years spent ministering to the dying without receiving an answer from God. For him, faith can function as hope and consolation even when certainty has failed. He defends the church because those who come to it still believe, and because its Baroque art offers them a refuge from despair.

Quart’s later reconstruction leaves the deaths suspended between explanations: divine anger, fate, or mere chance. He recognizes that the evidence does not demonstrate a human hand, even as the circumstances invite suspicion. That unresolved space matters to the church’s struggle: the same damaged cornice can be read as proof of neglect, as the cause of a fatal accident, or as part of a story of supernatural punishment. The deaths sharpen the danger surrounding the restoration, but do not settle either the mystery or the argument over whether the church should endure.