A Veracruz Church

It is the second gran project built in Galicia by the architect Antonio Palacios Ramilo of the entire series of works on relixious themes. The first was the Votive Temple of the Sea of Panxón, in Nigrán, Pontevedra. The project of the Veracruz Temple was commissioned in 1942, taking advantage of a visit from the architect to Ourense, by Evaristo Vaamonde, parish priest of the town, and a commission of vicars who considered the parish church insufficient and tried to build a new one.

It is built in its entirety with materials from the region, especially granite and chalice, representing the greatest and identifying work of the town. The style, in its context, is difficult to define; for some reason it is an amalgam of various architectural and sculptural forms.

Meanwhile, the historian of O Carballiño, Felipe Senén Gómez, a scholar of palatial works, who studied this case extensively, focusing on its religious architecture, said that  “its temples are like a theotic sum of the historical architecture of Galicia, in relation to the architecture of the Camino de Santiago, the English architecture, Atlantism and, as models and admiration of Palacios to the Viennese School”.

Thus, they obscure influences and features of all these forms of construction: pazos (galician palaces), monasteries (Oseira, Melón), cathedrals, churches, castles. The symbolology is present in each of the elements of the temple and, in its context, Veracruz is a whole expressionist symbol of the time.