Peñuelas and Urbizu die at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas

The deaths of Peñuelas and Father Urbizu at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas are investigated as unrelated accidents, but their echo persists: both occur amid the church’s dangerous restoration work, and both make the building seem capable of striking those who threaten or disturb it. The police find physical causes for each fall, while the surrounding story leaves open how much significance to assign to coincidence, a decaying structure, and the idea that a church might defend itself.

The deaths and their physical causes

Peñuelas, a municipal architect commissioned by the Seville City Council to prepare a report on the church’s ruin, had clashed with Father Príamo Ferro. During one of his visits to inspect the building, he leaned on a wooden railing by the bell tower. The rotten timber gave way, and he fell from the roof onto a partly assembled metal tube, which pierced him. Another official was present, as was Father Óscar, the parish vicar; Óscar administered the last rites. The circumstances gave the archbishop grounds to dismiss talk of a mysterious death, even though Peñuelas’s conflicts with Ferro could invite suspicion.

The police reconstruction adds that Peñuelas had spent about half an hour walking over the roof, looking for evidence to support the ruin report. Witnesses saw the fall, and the subsequent inspection found no evidence that anyone had tampered with the railing. The subcommissioner Simeón Navajo explains the event to Lorenzo Quart through an almost jaunty pantomime: his fingers walk along the table’s edge, then the railing yields and Peñuelas falls onto the imagined tube. The comic gesture does not alter the physical violence of the death; it shows how readily an ordinary accident can be made both vivid and grotesque.

Father Urbizu’s death has no witnesses. Navajo says investigators searched the church thoroughly and concluded that Urbizu may have leaned on an andamio, or moved it accidentally. Its upper end struck a large piece of cornice plaster that was already loose. The plaster, weighing more than ten kilograms, fell onto Urbizu’s head. Navajo’s hands sway like the andamio, then mime the cornice dropping; the reconstruction supplies a plausible sequence, but no eyewitness account. Unlike Peñuelas’s fall, which was seen and followed by an inspection of the railing, Urbizu’s death depends on evidence about the condition of the structure and the likely movement of the equipment.

Official findings and lingering doubt

Forensic findings and police conclusions agree that both deaths were accidental. In Urbizu’s case, experts traced the damaged cornice to a pocket of moisture behind the wall: water had seeped through gaps in the roof for years. Asked whether human intervention could be ruled out, Navajo declines to claim absolute certainty. He estimates the possibility as five percent, while emphasizing that a deliberate killing would require someone to loosen or dislodge the plaster, wait for Urbizu to look up, and make the collapse appear accidental. In his view, such a scheme is improbable.

The distinction between the two cases matters. Peñuelas’s fall has witnesses and no detected tampering; Urbizu’s has no witnesses, but a documented structural weakness offers an explanation. Neither account establishes murder. At the same time, Navajo’s qualified confidence is not proof that intervention was impossible. The investigation settles the official classification, not every question the setting raises.

The deaths also sit within a political dispute over the church’s future. Rumors concern pressure from property developers, the city, and banks, but Navajo’s superiors want the police to remain outside what they regard as an ecclesiastical matter. Although Spanish by origin and familiar to Navajo, Quart is an agent of a foreign state. The deaths therefore acquire significance beyond forensic procedure: they occur at a site contested by religious responsibility and commercial interests, while the police limit their involvement to establishing how the men died.

The church as a cause and an interpretation

As Quart leaves Navajo, he considers whether the anonymous hacker Vísperas exaggerated the notion that the church kills to defend itself. Perhaps the claim is true only in a free, symbolic sense: a three-century-old, decaying building can bring about the deaths of people who come to inspect or work on it, whether through its own condition, chance, or Providence. The thought does not amount to a finding that the church is supernatural or that either death was murder. Rather, it registers how the two accidents have begun to shape Quart’s perception of the place.

Gris Marsala later warns Quart that some places and people cannot be passed through with impunity. She names Seville, the church, Ferro, and Macarena as forces entangled with what he is entering. Her warning gives the deaths a wider narrative resonance: the church is not merely a building with unsafe railings and plaster, but a place whose human conflicts and material decay are difficult to separate. The warning does not resolve whether the deaths are linked; it makes their coincidence harder to treat as emotionally neutral.

The later death of Honorato Bonafé sharpens the contrast without proving that the earlier cases were crimes. Navajo reconstructs Bonafé’s fatal fall from the altar scaffolding as a violent encounter with Ferro: Bonafé may have fallen or been pushed, injured his hand trying to catch a screw, and dragged himself to the confessional, where he died. Police also find a possible motive connected to the Virgin statue’s pearls: the originals had been replaced with imitations, and money from the originals may have helped pay for the church’s stalled restoration. That later case concerns suspected human violence; the deaths of Peñuelas and Urbizu remain classified as accidents. Their juxtaposition encourages suspicion, but it does not erase the difference in evidence.

Death, faith, and the meaning of loss

Ferro’s reflections give the deaths a human and theological dimension without supplying a hidden explanation for them. At sixty-four, he says that after reading ancient philosophy as a young priest, he remembers chiefly that people remember, fear, and die. He recalls years of loneliness, Sunday Mass in a nearly empty church, and carrying the last rites to the dying. For a quarter of a century, he says, he spoke to people who clung to his hands for comfort, while his own prayers received no answer.

Ferro frames the human response to death as a choice between a governing plan and accident. If people die without purpose and leave no memory, he argues, the universe seems chaotic and life meaningless; faith can then become hope and consolation. This argument does not establish that the two falls were providential. Instead, it explains why Ferro defends Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas even if his own belief is uncertain: those who come to the church do believe, and their need for consolation justifies its existence.

He connects that pastoral purpose to the church’s Baroque form, with its carved figures, gilding, and lavish altars. In his account, religious art addresses the emotions and offers people a refuge from analysis that might strip away hope. Quart objects that this kind of consolation risks alienation. Their disagreement clarifies the stakes attached to the deaths: the church may be read as a dangerous, deteriorating structure, as a contested property, or as a refuge for people confronting mortality. None of those readings cancels the others.

Ferro’s account of the cosmos elsewhere makes the same vulnerability visible on a larger scale. He argues that awareness of humanity’s smallness in the universe need not produce despair; what may remain is a friend’s hand, offering resignation and consolation before the stars go dark. Against the investigation’s practical question of how two men fell, this idea sets the work’s deeper uncertainty: causes can be reconstructed, but death still presses the living to decide what, if anything, can give it meaning.

Narrative significance

Peñuelas and Urbizu’s deaths establish the church’s danger before the later murder turns its scaffolding into the scene of an apparent human crime. The first fall is witnessed and tied to a rotten railing; the second is reconstructed through a damaged cornice, years of water seepage, and a plausible movement of the andamio. Their different evidentiary circumstances prevent the pair from becoming a single proven conspiracy, even as their repetition feeds the rumor that the building destroys those who approach it.

The deaths therefore function both as an investigation and as an interpretive test. Navajo’s material explanations resist sensational conclusions, while Quart’s thought about accident, Providence, and a church that kills symbolically shows how the same events can gather meaning beyond their official findings. The later Bonafé case makes that uncertainty more consequential, but it does not retroactively convert Peñuelas’s and Urbizu’s accidents into murders. Their significance lies precisely in the unresolved distance between a plausible physical cause and the human need to understand what a death means.