This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

For more than a thousand years, the battlements of Matrera castle have withstood the alternating onslaughts of Moors and Christians, the pummelling of torrential rains and the tendrilled, reclaiming creep of nature.



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Today, however, the 2-metre-thick walls of the Andalusian fortress find themselves under a different, if equally ferocious, siege.

A recently completed restoration project, intended to shore up the castle after its ruins were severely damaged by rains three years ago, has provoked an incredulous reaction from some locals and a Spanish conservation group.

Photographs of the castle’s newly restored tower, in which new materials have been used to protect older stones and to return the hulk to its original shape and dimensions, have been mocked online and in the nearby town of Villamartín in Cádiz province.

Local residents told Spain’s La Sexta channel they weren’t impressed, or, as one man put it: “They’ve got builders in rather than restorers and, like we say round here, they’ve cocked it up.”

The Spanish heritage and conservation group, Hispania Nostra, was similarly critical – if slightly more measured in its language.

“The ‘consolidation and restoration’ - as the architects involved call it - [is] truly lamentable and has left locals and foreigners deeply shocked,” it said.

“Comments aren’t really necessary when you’ve seen the photographs. Foreigners have written to us saying they can’t understand why these follies – better described as heritage ‘massacres’ – still go on. And that is indeed what they are.”

Twitter, characteristically, has been rather more blunt. “It’s pretty clear that restorations of works of art in Spain always end up worse than the original,” wrote one user.

Another reached for the hysterically weeping emojis as she, and others, invoked the poster child of recent, ill-fated Spanish restoration projects: the horrifically botched attempt by a devout elderly woman to undo the damage that time had done to Elías García Martínez’s 19th century fresco of Christ, Ecce Homo.

“What the hell have they done to Matrera castle in Cádiz?” she asked. “And we thought Ecce Homo was bad!”

However, Carlos Quevedo, the architect who oversaw the restoration of the castle, which has been declared a heritage site of cultural interest, pointed out that the project had been painstaking, professional, and legal.

“There were three basic aims behind it,” he told the Guardian. “To structurally consolidate those elements that were at risk; to differentiate new additions from the original structure – thus avoiding the imitative reconstructions that are prohibited by law; and to recover the volume, texture and tonality that the tower would originally have had.”

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While he declined to comment on the comparisons with Ecce Homo, he called for people to think a little more about the business of restoration before leaping to judgment.

“As far as I’m concerned, opinions are always welcome and constructive criticism and debate are always enriching,” he said. “But I do think that some basic, accurate information can help avoid some of the prejudices that spring from a simple image.”

Amid the outrage and the hilarity is the more serious issue of how Spain preserves its architectural heritage. In 2002, developers in Madrid knocked down the house belonging to the city’s patron saint, San Isidro.

Eight years ago, following almost two decades of legal squabbling, Spain’s supreme court ruled that the over-restored Roman amphitheatre in the Valencian town of Sagunto should returned to its previously ruined state.