Sticks for the Spires

Justo Gallego Martínez entered a Trappist monastery at twenty-seven and was thrown out eight years later with tuberculosis, just before his final vows. When he recovered, he promised the Virgin of the Pillar a shrine. On her feast day in 1961, on family farmland outside Madrid, he laid the first brick himself. He was still laying them sixty years later.

He had no architectural training, no engineer, no permit, no funding from the state or the Church. He built from postcards of St. Peter's and the Taj Mahal tacked to the walls of the site. His bricks were factory rejects, warped hollow blocks the local kiln couldn't sell. He cast his pillars inside stacked oil drums and his smaller columns inside plastic buckets, seams and all. The window arches carry the tread marks of the tires he used as molds. He raised a forty-metre dome with a winch and pulleys made from bicycle wheels. It stayed up. In his nineties he was still climbing his own scaffolding.

Then the storks arrived.

They began nesting on the half-built spires. Finishing the towers would have meant driving them off. So he started carrying sticks up the scaffolding for them.

The spires were never finished. He wanted them open.