"The pantheon where the remains of Valentín Lamas Carvajal , his wife Amalia Rosina Sánchez and other family members rest, the work of Vázquez Gulías , has just been rehabilitated. A preventive conservation, as Ana Malingre , great-great-granddaughter of the poet and journalist from Ourense, says. The descendants of six generations have carried out work without which the mausoleum would end up becoming a ruin, as is the case with others found in the San Francisco cemetery , declared a Site of Cultural Interest, damaged by humidity and eaten away by ivy. who jump over the walls from the land occupied by the military barracks. The lack of conservation has led many of these pantheons—some works by Daniel Vázquez-Gulías, such as that of Ruperto García, one of the most prominent in the cemetery—to present a ruinous state. The family of Lamas Carvajal did not want this to happen to theirs and has carried out a cleaning work that, initially, will help preserve the place where the remains of one of the most famous Galician writers rest. Behind this initiative is Ana Malingre, who was able to excite a family that goes back six generations, so as not to overshadow a work designed down to the smallest detail by Amalia Rosina Sánchez.
Malingre and another 70-year-old relative are the only ones who currently reside in the city and it is up to them to preserve its history. Valentín Lamas was the maternal grandfather of his grandfather Arturo. «I come four times a year to clean it. My heart sank as I watched the ivy take over the stone and I thought I would end up like many others. As it is BIC, you have to request and pay for many permits, in addition to waiting a long time to undertake the works, so in the end we did a preventive cleaning, although we had to request a license to put up scaffolding. All the moisture seeps inside and it fills with verdigris. I thought something had to be done, although right now none of us can bury ourselves there,” explains Malingre.
The turning point was finding, during the completion of her doctoral thesis, a manuscript in which Amalia Rosina Sánchez explained what she wanted the pantheon to be like, where the poet, who had died two years earlier, was buried in 1908. Retail. "It's what she wanted it to be, she ordered the stone, chose the builder and kept all the receipts she paid," she says. Malingre got to work this summer and hired the services of a funeral home that was responsible for cleaning the stone without affecting it.
She told part of her family – she calls them the group of Lamas – her intention not to let the legacy die. They didn't even think about it. They all wanted to contribute to the cause, despite not residing in the city and many of them having met in 2018 at a meeting in Ourense. «It is a shame that many cemeteries are like the BIC cemetery. Many descendants no longer live in the city and are falling away. Everything is obstacles. "The administration must act," laments Malingre, who believes that the same thing would have happened to her great-great-grandfather if she had not gotten to work."
(
visit link)