Europe > Spain > Madrid > Madrid > Articles > Don Justo and the Home-made Cathedral

Eighty-year-old Justo Gallego Martínez has spent the last forty-four years building a ‘home-made cathedral,’ single-handed, in a village near Madrid.

The locals of Mejorada del Campo have traditionally known the building as ‘la catedral del loco’ and for most of their lives Justo has been hammering, chiselling, paving, hoisting and cementing from dawn ‘til dusk. It was certainly a crazy idea when, on an autumn day in 1961, Don Justo (as he’s now more respectfully known) laid the first stone in what would be an 8,000 square meter cathedral. Technically, it was an impossibility for one man to attempt such a task. Impossible, but for the fact that Don Justo has almost done it.

The main building is now fifty meters long and the cross on its dome soars thirty-seven meters over the main street. Beneath the floor there is a huge crypt and at the back is a complex of minor chapels, cloisters, lodgings and a library.

Don Justo still turns up every morning at 6am and works solidly for ten hours a day as he races to finish what he has started. If he can raise funds, he believes that it is still possible that he could complete the cathedral before he is eight-five and his strength starts to fail. He says that hard work is a habit he picked up from the Trappist monastery where he spent seven years as a young man.

“I’m a monk by vocation and a labourer by destiny,” he smiles. While at the monastery he contracted tuberculosis and the abbot, fearing an epidemic within the confines of his dominion, evicted Justo. He plunged into a severe depression and now seems to have no clear recollection of how the idea came about to build a cathedral. In 1961 he sold some land that he had inherited and, on 12th October (feast-day of the Virgin del Pilar), he began the work that would last the rest of his life.

“I’m doing it for my mother who always wanted me to work for the church,” he says simply. “Everything I do is for the church.”

Although the church’s influence is slipping, (there are now only 19,000 priests for 23,000 churches) it remains one of the most powerful institutions in Spain. Don Justo is just old enough to remember the dark days of the civil war when communist forces, fighting Franco, shot priests and ransacked the church in Mejorada del Campo.

He was only ten at the time but the memory has left him with little respect for the town’s socialist administration. Perhaps the feeling is mutual because the mayor seems to be doing his best to ignore the project and even the town’s new website (desperately grasping for subject matter) makes no mention of its only viable tourist attraction. Happily, Don Justo has never had much to do with the official channels: his cathedral has never received either planning permission from the council or the recognition of the church.

“There was never a plan, no project, no nada,” he says. “I’m a labourer, not an architect. I never put anything on paper. That’s a waste of time - the land is what mattered. I just levelled the earth and then mapped out the ground-works.

“I sold a couple of fields and rented out other pieces and this has given me the funds to buy what had to be bought. I dug through rubbish tips and abandoned building-sites for whatever leftover materials I could recycle.”

Mejorada del Campo lies on the flight-path into Madrid’s Barajas airport and a quick drive around the area is enough to convince the visitor that this region has seen more building (and presumably wastage) during the last four decades than ever in its history. The work on the cathedral has been done without the help of machinery or cranes but Justo had the occasional muscle-power of several nephews, and eleven years ago, he took local lad Antonio Rey Fernandez on as a permanent assistant.

The boss ‘does not believe’ in holidays, sick pay or insurance and safety regulations are somewhat lax on this particular construction job. A rickety scaffolding of cobbled-together bits of wood and lashed-together tubing lifts the workers thirty meters into the vaulted ceilings. When I offer to go out for breakfast Antonio takes it as an invitation for the first beer of the day. It seems clear that the octogenarian ‘foreman’ (with a red wool skullcap for a hardhat and a pair of threadbare slippers for work-boots) must indeed be enjoying some particularly powerful form of protection if in forty-four years he has never suffered an injury.

High up on one of the main columns a little eight-inch icon of the Virgin del Pilar (patrona of Spain) oversees the work and protects her devotee.

But the question that is on everyone’s lips now is ‘can the Virgin del Pilar guarantee the safety of the finished building?’ The cathedral has never had a thorough inspection by an architect and nobody is sure what the foundations where like in the days when Don Justo was just Mejorada del Campo’s ‘loco de la catedral.’

The old man is convinced that the church will use the building after his death but there are those who say that it will have to be demolished since nobody is prepared to take responsibility for its structural integrity.

Epifanio Corredera, who runs Bar Terraza across the street from the cathedral, believes that it will end up as a museum: “It can’t be used as a church because nobody knows the safety aspects of the building. Besides the local bishop already has a cathedral at Alcalá de Henares [six miles away].”

Don Justo and his cathedral suddenly shot to fame when they appeared on national television in an advert for Aquarius soft drinks. “Because of the special circumstances of this story we paid Justo the same rate as we would have paid for a headline actor,” Felix Muñoz, marketing director in Spain, told reporters from El Mundo newspaper. It is believed that Aquarius dropped about $45,000 in Don Justo’s collection plate (the only official or corporate funding that he has ever received).

At first most viewers assumed the advert was a hoax dreamt up to fit the ‘age of Aquarius’ image but now as many as 1,000 visitors a day come to see the incredible building and to meet the man whose dedication has become a national inspiration.

Whatever may become of his cathedral in the end there are those who feel that Don Justo has already achieved what he was destined to do. He has already shown that there is little that a man cannot do if he devotes himself to it. Don Justo’s example lies more in the challenge than in the result - more in the journey than the destination.

“I don’t think I’ve done anything incredible here,” he says. “I’ve got some qualities that God has given me and they’ve solved everything. I’m only doing what I had to do.”

As I prepare to leave an old woman who has been looking around touches Don Justo on the arm and, with a look of sympathy, asks tenderly: “But tell me, was there really nobody here to help you?”

Don Justo smiles: “El Señor de arriba, me ayudaba señora - qué más le falta?” “The man upstairs has helped me. What more could I need?”

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