Peñuelas’s fatal fall at Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas is officially treated as an accident, yet its consequences make it impossible to leave it as a merely local mishap. The municipal architect had been sent to prepare the church’s ruin report, a step toward its evacuation and eventual demolition. His death delayed that process, intensified suspicion around the church, and joined the later death of Archbishop Corvo’s secretary in turning a real-estate conflict into a matter of public and ecclesiastical alarm.

The inspection and the fall

The Seville City Council commissioned Peñuelas to assess Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas and prepare the technical file needed to declare it structurally ruined. Archbishop Corvo later described the building as condemned and said the cultural heritage authorities had relinquished responsibility for preserving it for lack of funds; the municipal government was close to endorsing that decision. The architect’s death was the reason the file had not yet been closed.

Peñuelas had clashed with Father Príamo Ferro during his visits to the church. Corvo characterized the architect as unpleasant and Ferro as no model of mildness, but presented their arguments as part of a contentious inspection rather than evidence of a crime. During one visit, the wooden railing of a scaffold gave way. Peñuelas fell from the roof and landed on a partly assembled metal tube, which pierced him. The blunt outline of the accident—fall, exposed construction material, fatal impact—was repeated in accounts of the two deaths associated with the church, helping make the site’s danger feel at once physical and uncanny.

Witnesses and competing accounts

Peñuelas was not alone when he fell. According to Corvo, another municipal official accompanied him, and Father Óscar, the parish vicar, was also present; Óscar administered the last rites. This witness information gives the death a procedural, observable setting, even as Quart’s questions show that the circumstances are being tested rather than simply accepted. The available account does not identify the other official or provide a separate testimony from either witness.

Corvo insisted that there was nothing mysterious about Peñuelas’s death and called it bad luck. The police account likewise reconstructed a specific accident: the scaffold’s wooden handrail failed during the architect’s movements around the building. Yet the death’s timing made that explanation consequential. Peñuelas was preparing the report that could clear the way for the church’s evacuation, while Ferro opposed pressure against the parish. The known conflict supplies a reason for scrutiny, not proof that the fall was deliberate; the narrative preserves that distinction even as it places the accident inside a charged dispute.

The church under pressure

The death interrupted an administrative process already moving toward demolition. Corvo said the heritage authorities had stopped seeking to preserve the church because of budget constraints and that the city was about to confirm its ruin status. In his account, Peñuelas’s fatal accident was the obstacle keeping the paperwork open. The consequence was not a reversal of the demolition plan but a complication: the church could not be treated as an ordinary condemned property while a fatal incident at the site remained in public memory.

The stakes extend beyond the building’s physical condition. The dispute concerns land and money, and Corvo framed church demolition as something that could be justified in a crisis if the sale proceeds were dedicated to the greater glory of God. The deaths disrupt that tidy institutional logic. They make the church’s future not only an administrative and financial question but a question of accountability: who benefits from declaring the building ruined, and how should the deaths connected with that decision be understood?

From accident to pattern

Peñuelas’s fall becomes the first of two deaths linked to Nuestra Señora de las Lágrimas. The second, Father Urbizu’s death, was also explained as an accident involving the church’s restoration equipment: a scaffold allegedly shifted and dislodged a heavy fragment of plaster cornice onto him. The parallel does not establish a common cause, but it makes the language of misfortune increasingly strained. Quart asks about the deaths; Corvo insists on chance, while other characters speak of the church and those tied to it as places and people one cannot pass through without consequence.

The later discovery of Honorato Bonafé’s body in the confessional adds a third death at the church, but of a different and more troubling kind. Police reconstruction placed Bonafé on the altar scaffold beside the Virgin’s image, where he may have confronted Ferro over imitation pearls substituted for the originals. Navajo’s account described a fall of about five metres, a hand wound sustained while Bonafé tried to catch a scaffold bolt, and his attempt to crawl to the confessional, where he died. The police then proposed that Ferro might have surprised and killed him while dealing with the pearls, although the reconstruction remained inferential and Ferro did not explain his disappearance. Set beside Peñuelas’s documented fall, the later case sharpens the distinction between a death that has a clear accidental mechanism and one whose circumstances remain contested.

Faith, memory, and the meaning of misfortune

Peñuelas’s death also helps expose the moral pressure at the heart of Ferro’s defense of the parish. He celebrates Mass at eight each morning, and his old-fashioned liturgical practice—including vestments associated with pre–Second Vatican Council usage and the use of Latin for parts of the service—marks his resistance to ecclesiastical modernization. His defense of the church, however, is not reducible to ritual conservatism. Ferro says that people who come to the parish have faith, and that their need for hope justifies the church’s existence even if his own belief is uncertain.

In a conversation with Quart, Ferro recalls years spent visiting the dying and offering comfort to people who had no one else. He speaks of human beings as creatures who remember, fear, and die, and of faith as consolation against a universe that otherwise appears chaotic and meaningless. That outlook gives the competing descriptions of Peñuelas’s fall particular weight: calling it bad luck may be a practical explanation, but it cannot settle what death means to those left behind. The church’s threatened demolition and the deaths within it thus converge on a single unresolved issue—whether institutions can preserve a place of consolation when its physical ruin, financial value, and human losses are all being used to argue for different futures.