It seems a joke, but it is not. The mayor of San Sebastián decided to remove the historic railing from La Concha beach, which had just turned one hundred years old, and replace it with a replica. We are talking about the year 2016. According to some, the railing was in a poor state of conservation, but the fact is that shortly after that same railing, very beautiful, reappeared placed on the Lepe promenade. Yes, Lepe: I already said that it seems like a joke. The first thing that comes to mind: is a railing that works for Lepe really not good for San Sebastián? And the second thing: what a waste of time for the people of San Sebastian, who have seen how the leperos have kept the original while they have had to settle for the copy! At least for once, those of Lepe are not the fools of the joke, but the smart ones.
I have found this episode in Spain ugly, the recently published book by Andrés Rubio about the calamities suffered by the Spanish historical heritage: urban chaos, devastation of the coastline, degradation of the landscape, destruction of much of the best architecture. The thesis could not be more emphatic: if you believed that the excesses and outrages committed against heritage are the fault of Franco's developmentalism, you were wrong. The worst came after Franco's death. It is not by chance that the subtitle of the book speaks of the “greatest failure of democracy”.
The one involving the railing on La Concha beach is just one (and surely the least serious) of the many cases that illustrate this journey through the destruction committed over the last four decades. Agricultural warehouses attached to Romanesque hermitages, monstrous hotels built without the slightest respect for law or decorum, disproportionate and dilapidated congress palaces, the savage demolition of iconic buildings or their reduction to a mere shell, the distortion of traditional architecture to adapt to the demands of the tourism sector, the meticulous erasure of all traces of the industrial past in certain urban recoveries, housing developments of dubious medievalizing taste in historic centers, the razing of privileged landscapes with the chaotic construction of beehives in competition for the best views… The list, in short, would be endless.
All these nonsense have occurred in the last thirty or forty years, when we believed that there were laws that protected us against them. It is significant that the Republican Constitution of 1931 expressly declared its will to protect the landscape. On the other hand, the one from 1978, much more verbose, does not contain any mention of that nature. Then what happens happens: that the legislators are inhibited in the protection of a collective good and that this inhibition drags everything else in a domino effect: the struggles between the different administrations, the inevitable legal gibberish, the cronyism between politicians and promoters, etc. If we start looking for those responsible, nobody is saved here, and the result is that, due to a cocktail of greed, corruption, ignorance and negligence, Spain has ended up becoming a country that has destroyed many things that should not be destroyed and has built many others that do not either.
The French, more lovers of their territory and their past than we of ours, created the Conservatoire du Littoral half a century ago, which in a few years will have managed to recover twenty-five percent of the coastline for the State. Thus, a quarter of the French coast has become untouchable and will remain as it has always been. Can you imagine that something like this existed in Spain and the degradation of the coastline had been stopped in time? In Andrés Rubio's book, Benidorm is spoken of as a somewhat shabby example of kitsch architecture, but it is also recognized that its high-rise construction proposal has ended up being much more respectful of the environment than the opposite model, that of stain of oil. It is something that I have been hearing for a long time from various illustrious architects and urban planners: a dozen strategically distributed Benidorms would have saved the Spanish coast. Those Benidorms would have been our particular Coastal Conservatory.
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