Justo Gallego has been building his own house of worship in a suburb of Madrid for 60 years. Now he has turned 95 – and still believes in one day he will complete his work
Ángel López smashes a bidet in a corner of the nave of Justo Gallego’s cathedral. “They brought that over the other day when I wasn’t here,” López later recounts. “Sometimes they bring me things that I don’t need.” Now he is sitting on a worn armchair and yawning. He didn’t sleep much. “I cannot calm down. I have to take care of Justo at night. ‘Ángel, I can’t breathe, Ángel, I’m suffocating.’ Then I get up and help him. “
Ángel López is Justo Gallego’s heir, his keeper, his site manager, his apostle. He wants to finish the work that Gallego began 60 years ago: the construction of a church in Gallego’s home village of Mejorada del Campo, a suburb of Madrid. The assignment was a heavenly one, not an earthly one. Without a plan, without permission and without technical knowledge, Gallego set to work in 1961. He worked from morning to night, with everything he found, what he begged and what was given to him.
The church grew under the disbelief of the villagers. Gallego got very old about it, now he is 95 and rarely goes into public. But his church stands, unfinished, but still recognizable as a church, so impressive that they all only call the “Cathedral of Justo Gallego”. It is not a cathedral, not even a consecrated church, but a monument of faith: in God and in oneself. A work of art made from waste. A challenge to the laws of nature. A mighty villa motley.
The journalist and writer Manuel Juliá met Gallego two years ago in May. “I said to him: Justo, you always talk about modesty. But you have made the most vain and proudest imaginable: to build a cathedral. He replied: It is not there for people, but for God, and it must be the best for God. “
Gallego told his story many times. He was a farm laborer when he decided to become a monk at the age of 27. As a novice he fell ill with tuberculosis and had to leave the monastery. In order to serve God nonetheless, he decided to build his own cathedral on a small piece of land in Mejorada del Campo that belonged to him. For Manuel Juliá, Gallego is a perfect Don Quixote. Juliá has written a book on contemporary quixotesque figures, one of the chapters is dedicated to Justo Gallego and his cathedral. Quixotesk means: to undertake something impossible. “When it is possible, nobody calls it quixotesque,” says Juliá.
The cathedral (which is not a cathedral) is really an impossibility. A few years ago, the young Madrid architect Alejandro Villagrasa ran their most important structural data through a computer program, and the result was that it couldn’t last. But the reality is persistent: the Church has stood for 60 years, in varying degrees of perfection, and nothing has ever happened. No work-related accidents, no injured visitors, and certainly no collapsing ceilings or walls. “Architectural reality” – as Villagrasa calls it – shows that what Justo Gallego has built is durable. It’s pretty wondrous.
The village – now a small town with 23,000 people – is divided over this miracle. “Half think it’s admirable,” says Pedro Muñoz, who runs the “Esmeralda” café near the town hall, “the other half thinks it’s crazy.” Muñoz is one of the admirers. “Someone who sacrifices their life for something is not understood by society,” he says with regret. In any case, Mejorada del Campo benefits from Justo’s work, it brings a little tourism to the place, which otherwise has absolutely nothing to offer in terms of tourism. The local government hasn’t known for decades what to do with this thing that everyone calls a cathedral, but it’s an illegal structure.
On the one hand it should have been torn down long ago, on the other hand it has earned the place a certain fame. The long agonizing indecision seems to have been overcome this year. In April the mayor made old Gallego an honorary citizen before it was too late. And his church is to be declared a monument. Then it would no longer be illegal.
It would be a strange monument. “It’s not nice,” says the café owner Muñoz, before making a comparison: “A picture by Miró or Picasso may not seem beautiful to you if you don’t know anything about art …”
Arts? Gallego wanted to create beauty, not art, but the opposite happened to him. “His work is pure eclecticism,” says the Madrid architect Manuel Ocaña, “a representation of what a cathedral is to him. And he built it as he could. From garbage. “
An example: he asked for misshapen bricks from a neighboring brickworks, which he walled up with the underside to the front to make enchanting towers. A second example: the springs, “they are his greatest discovery,” says Ocaña with a cheer in her voice. He created window and other arches from cement-filled springs because he lacked the time and knowledge to chisel proper cornices.
It is such details that fascinate Ocaña. But he is even more enthusiastic about “the will, the heroism, the individuality, the personality” behind the building; the process of creation more than the finished work. “A 60-year performance,” he calls Gallego’s cathedral building.
The worst that can happen to such a work of art is its completion. But Justo Gallego has wanted to build a church for 60 years, in which masses will one day be read, and for that it has to be finished. The heir, Ángel López, determined by Gallego, who is also self-taught like his master, is supposed to complete the construction. At the beginning of July, two months after our first meeting, López taps marble fragments in soft cement to complete the half-finished floor of the main nave.
This is how Justo worked before him, this is how 48-year-old López now works: with diligence and patience, taking on one task after the other, with the material that is currently available. Towards completion.
But the church has not been the same since our first visit in late April. You don’t notice it right away, but then, as a small shock. She is tidy! You no longer smell like garbage dump! It is flooded with light: the cardboard in front of many window openings has been replaced by translucent plastic. The gallery, which is seven and a half to eleven meters high, now protects its visitors from falling with wide-meshed metal grids. Colorful flags hang all around. The once roughly plastered interior walls are professionally smoothed. And at every passage, printed signs show the way. Justo Gallego’s Cathedral has dressed up, as far as it can. A Catholic aid organization, Mensajeros de la Paz, invested tens of thousands of euros in their beautification. One day she wants to provide help and shelter here to those in need. Ángel López is very satisfied, and so is Gallego, says López.
Alejandro Villagrasa is less. In my opinion, the renovation “takes some of its value from the work,” says the architect. “The beauty of this church is precisely its imperfection. It is a museum of itself. ”Nevertheless, he would have a suggestion for perfecting it. A good two years ago, in his final thesis, he drew up an original plan of how the dome, which has been enthroned as an open metal skeleton over the church for 25 years, could be closed without its weight or the wind causing the roof or the entire building to collapse.
It is quite possible that one day the plan will be carried out. Then it stopped raining inside. Then it would almost be a real church. And yet: “I would never finish it,” says Villagrasa. Also not tear off. But leave it as a monument to the eternally imperfect.
