A dolmen in the 'cortello'
Neighbors of O Saviñao locate after 30 years of waiting the lid of a megalithic tomb converted into a water trough
When they located in the courtyard of the big house that huge stone that took them a world to find, all at once held their breath, as if it were a sleeping beast that it was convenient not to wake up. Then they waited a few minutes. They did not dare to turn it over, lest what was guessed on the underside was confirmed by the beam of the rock. And unfortunately they were right. The "legend" that ran through the parish of Vilasante was a truth like a fist. The lords of the big house with cypress, more than a century ago, sent for an elongated and robust stone to carve a trough for the animals. Those in charge of doing the work did not hesitate to choose the block they were going to chisel. The best one was up there, in a place known as Campo das Mámoas. It was a stone of the best granite, that it is not known since when it foolishly rested on five or six other smaller ones, but also bulky ones, who were standing, kneeling on the ground. This capricious mass of megaliths was called the Dolmen of Abuime.
And it was not enough for them to roughly cut down the lid of the dolmen on one side, but they did an exquisite job, a large pile drawn with pencils, carved by the hands of a perfectionist stonemason who finished his work by drilling a drain. From this recycling effort of the inheritance of the past that today would be classified as a crime against heritage, there was a written reference in a study on the megalithism of the area published by a woman born in Vilasante, Pura Lorenzana, together with her friends Cuevillas and Fraguas. It was about her entrance job at the Seminario de Estudos Galegos; the History and Language teacher read Mámoas del Saviñao. The anta of Abuime and the necropolis of Monte da Morá in May 1930. And then he told the wise men that the stone of the dolmen had been transferred to the court of a house in Vilasante.
After the discovery, no one doubts in O Saviñao that the trough is the top of the anta even though it is unrecognizable. "I bet 100 to one that the pia is the stone we were looking for," says the president of the recreational circle and director of the institute Enrique Sampil. He, in addition to the mayor, Joaquín González, and the owner of a company that provided the machines to clear and move the debris that blinded the patio of the house, uninhabited, ruined and closed for 30 years, joined the desire of another neighbor from Escairón, the municipal seat.
Every time he returns to his parents' house, José Losada, a 71-year-old migrant in Las Palmas, clears the Abuime dolmen of weeds, which preserves five of the 10 ortostats that it must have had and is “one one of the largest in Galicia ”. In the town they call him Pepe Carriola, a "good" alcume that he inherited from his parents and does not know where he comes from. And since it hurts him, on his returns, year after year, to see that everything is increasingly "abandoned", for some time now, in addition to collecting old photos (he has collected 7,000), he has produced audiovisuals of the history and landscape of all the parishes. “In total there are 29, and I have 18; Let's see if I have time to finish them, ”he says. Last summer he got the dolmen parish. So he decided to move the issue off the stone.
“People had wanted to enter the house for three decades,” says Carriola. But he, in a few days, contacted all the heirs, "eight in total, scattered throughout half of Spain." "I have a certain knack for this, and I got clearance," he says. Then the shovels entered the jungle that invaded the ruins, and at the bottom appeared the long-awaited pile that five millennia ago gave a roof to the dead. Faced with such a perfect drinking fountain, no one hid their disappointment. The piece is no longer valid, it cannot be returned to its place. So while waiting for the results of an analysis of the granite that it commissioned from the University of Las Palmas to confirm that it is the top of the dolmen, the Canary Islands are negotiating permits to move the trough to the Plaza de Escairón. There he will give an example of what not to do.
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