For more than 60 years, former monk Justo Gallego had been building a cathedral out of scrap materials on the outskirts of Madrid, a project he would never see completed.
The 96-year-old died over the weekend, but left the unfinished complex in Mejorada del Campo to a charity run by a priest that has vowed to complete his labor of love.
Gallego began the project in 1961, when he was in his mid-30s, on land inherited from his family after a bout of tuberculosis forced him to leave an order of Trappist monks.
Photo: AFP
Today, the “Cathedral of Justo” features a crypt, two cloisters and 12 towers spread over 4,700m2, although the central dome still does not have a cover.
He used bricks, wood and other materials scavenged from old building sites, as well as through donations that began to arrive once the project became better known.
The building’s pillars are made from stacked oil drums, while windows have been cobbled and glued together from shards of colored glass.
“Recycling is fashionable now, but he used it 60 years ago when nobody talked about it,” said Juan Carlos Arroyo, an engineer and architect with engineering firm Calter.
The charity that is taking over the project, “Messengers of Peace,” hired the company to assess the structural soundness of the building, which lacks a permit.
“The structure has withstood significant weather events throughout its construction,” Arroyo said, predicting that it would only need some “small surgical interventions.”
Renowned British architect Norman Foster visited the site in 2009 — when he came to Spain to collect a prize — telling Gallego that he should be the one getting the award, Arroyo added.
The sturdiness of the project is surprising given that Gallego had no formal training as a builder, and he worked without a blueprint.
In interviews, he repeatedly said that the details for the cathedral were “in his head” and “it all comes from above.”
The complex stands in a street called Avenida Antoni Gaudi, named after the architect behind Barcelona’s iconic Sagrada Familia basilica, which has been under construction since 1883.
However, unlike the Sagrada Familia, the Cathedral of Justo Gallego, as it is known, is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as a place of worship.
Father Angel Garcia Rodriguez, the maverick priest who heads Messengers of Peace, wants to turn Gallego’s building into an inclusive space for all faiths and one that is used to help the poor.
“There are already too many cathedrals and too many churches, that sometimes lack people,” he said.
“It will not be a typical cathedral, but a social center where people can come to pray or if they are facing difficulties,” he added.
Father Angel is famous in Spain for running a restaurant offering meals to the homeless and for running a church in central Madrid where pets are welcome and the faithful can confess via iPad.
Inside the Cathedral of Justo, volunteers continued working on the structure, while a steady stream of visitors walked around the grounds admiring the building in the nondescript suburb.
“If the means are put in, especially materials and money, to finish it, then it will be a very beautiful place of worship,” said Ramon Calvo, 74, who was visiting the grounds with friends.
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
BACK TO BATTLE: North Korean soldiers have returned to the front lines in Russia’s Kursk region after earlier reports that Moscow had withdrawn them following heavy losses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday pored over a once-classified map of vast deposits of rare earths and other critical minerals as part of a push to appeal to US President Donald Trump’s penchant for a deal. The US president, whose administration is pressing for a rapid end to Ukraine’s war with Russia, on Monday said he wanted Ukraine to supply the US with rare earths and other minerals in return for financially supporting its war effort. “If we are talking about a deal, then let’s do a deal, we are only for it,” Zelenskiy said, emphasizing Ukraine’s need for security guarantees