ELENA LARRIBA
PONTEVEDRA / THE VOICE. 07/04/2010 02:00 H
In the last thirty years, Pontevedra suffered serious accidents that affected monumental assets, first-rate public facilities and private companies. In 1980 fire destroyed the Teatro Principal and the annex building of the Liceo Casino. In 1995, the flames destroyed part of the conventual church of San Francisco. In 2004 another fire destroyed in Alba the warehouse of the Hospital Complex archive where the medical records of thousands of people from Pontevedra were kept. And put to remember, that same year the Tradepana ship burned in the port of Marín. Too many shocks that jeopardized the safety of the city's real estate heritage and especially its most emblematic artistic buildings.
The San Francisco fire has just turned 15 years old. It was the early morning of Sunday, June 18, 1995 and only three months earlier there had also been the accidental detachment of a part of the central vault of the Basilica of Santa María La Mayor. Fortunately, in neither of the two incidents there were fatalities. Santa María was empty at the after dinner time, when the collapse occurred, and in San Francisco the friars who were asleep in a room far enough away from the fire were not in danger, although a firefighter was slightly injured in the extinguishing work , Corporal José García Cancela. Juan Luis Pedrosa had just been invested as mayor the morning before and his first dream as councilor of this city was altered by the church engulfed in flames. He himself told it more than once. "At four thirty in the morning Ernesto, the City Hall driver, came to look for me and from Salvador Moreno I already saw the glow of the flames." He reacted quickly and from Santiago they responded just as quickly to face the catastrophe. After 20 days the machines were already clearing the rubble for the reconstruction of the temple.
The fire was started by some candles that were lit in a room adjacent to the cloister. The chronicles of that time record that one of the five Franciscans who inhabited the convent got up to drink a glass of water and when he noticed the fire, he raised the alarm. But the local police and the fire brigade had already been alerted by an operator from Sellberg, the concessionaire of the cleaning service.LossesFrom the room where the fire started, the flames spread rapidly through two wings of the cloister and through the library, on the first floor, which was completely burned, as was the roof of the central body of the church and with it the choir and an organ of great value. Two images of Saint Cecilia and Saint Bonaventure were also lost, the mantles of La Dolorosa, embossed in jet, and of the Virgin of Lourdes and another of the Nazarene inlaid with gold, as well as numerous objects of worship. The entire Pontevedra Fire Department, reinforced by an endowment from Vigo, worked on the extinction work and ensured that the fire did not spread to other areas of the convent and the adjacent Treasury building. Around 8 in the morning, after more than four hours of extremely intense and risky work, they managed to control the fire.On the same morning of Sunday June 18, the then Minister of Culture traveled to Pontevedra to check the damage, less serious than expected, given the voracity of the flames that reached 20 meters in height, thanks to the effective intervention of firefighters.
The next day, technicians from the Xunta and the City Council went to work to assess the damage, while the president of the Xunta, Manuel Fraga, also visited the temple and personally realized the magnitude of the accident, of which the main altar and the tomb of Paio Gómez Charino were saved.On July 8, Construcciones Malvar began the debris removal tasks prior to the church reconstruction project commissioned by the architect Celestino García Braña. The cost of the works was initially estimated at 123 million of the old pesetas and the final investment amounted to almost 200 million.
Font: (
visit link)