Chapel of San Caralampio, located on the island of A Toxais perhaps the best known of O Grove due to the uniqueness of being covered entirely by scallop shells. Conceived by the Ourense architect Daniel Vázquez-Gulías, it was inaugurated on June 28, 1909.
A LITTLE HISTORY
The only chapel in the world covered with scallop shells.
Originally, when it was built in 1909, it was not. his story is off chance. The façade where the altar is is oriented to the sur y the rains continually lashed its walls, which produced humidity and deterioration in the structure of the construction. At the end of the 40s of the XXth century, Raimundo Riestra Calderón II, Marquis of Riestra, summoned a bricklayer from the town of O Grove, Anselmo Millán, with the intention of being offered a solution to this problem that they had been dragging for almost four decades. The man informed him that a traditional way of preventing the penetration of water was to imbricate scallop shells over the entire surface, which caused the liquid to run down all of them without wetting the interior. The marquis thought it was a wonderful idea and he accepted the proposal. When they finished covering that façade, he liked the result so much that, as manager of the spa, he ordered the entire chapel to be covered with shells. It was slow work that took several years. It started in the late 40’s and ended in the early 50’s.
And one last detail, if you could transport yourself 120 years back in time to the same place where you are, you would not step on land, but you would be in the water along with the chapel. Almost all of this garden was a old saltworks that loses its origins in the remotest past. It was filled in at the beginning of the XXth century.
