Jorge Lamas: “El Casco Vello is very limited, and in Vigo there are other areas worthy of attention”

Between news and news, history is made. In the case of La Voz de Galicia journalist and historian Jorge Lamas (Vigo, 1962), it is almost literal, because while things are happening that occupy the headlines in the media (some of them, he himself told), when the sediment, reflexive and the analytical side appears in the form of a book. that’s how it’s born From Calzada to Casco Vello de Vigo. A walk through history and architecture, a work edited by Xerais and already in bookstores. Previously, Lamas published with the same publisher Stories from Vigo (2018) and with the Instituto de Estudios Vigueses, whose member is: About Vigo that the French lived in the Reconquista (2021).

— Regarding the previous works, what is the main difference?

—That this book is intended as a manual guide for three historical and architectural tours of the city and the discovery of interesting details in the itineraries that go from Sanjurja Badía and García Barbón to Policarpo Sanz; from Rosalía de Castro to Marqués de Valladares; and from Areal to Alameda, recounting what was and is, stopping at characteristic places and making a few brushstrokes on buildings that had considerable weight. But it is not a guide in the tourist sense of the word. It is a manual for casual reading that can be taken on a walk.

— Why did you choose those routes and not others?

— That there are others in the future is a door that remains open, but the reason for establishing these itineraries is that I wanted to focus on areas of the city that are as old as Casco Vello, that are very well studied, spread out and widely He said, While this the area, which has a population occupied for two thousand years, is not so appreciated. And there is, because when the Romans arrived, they settled in Areal and there is everything there. Archaeological research carried out in recent years gives us surprising data. Much is owed to archaeological work.

— The three routes you describe are roads parallel to the urban coast…

— Yes, that’s why with the fall of the walls in 1861, the city, which already had a serious housing problem, began to expand eastward. The most famous part of this growth operation is what we know as Ensanche, but I refer it to the boundaries of the parish of Teis because there are areas that deserve mention, such as the port around Guixar, which was an entire district until 1969.

— Apart from the work with the documentation stuck to the chair, you will do those walks, treading on the asphalt, many times, right?

— I was born in Teis, and when those from my neighborhood left for Vigo, we only had one chance to get to the center. Historically there were two, one was supposed to go down Areal, which is now the port area. The second is any of the three described in the book. I have been on this path since I was 10 years old, so there are my own experiences, but contrary to the documentation. In many cases, what is now history was once news.

— One could almost say that he has been writing this book since he was 10 years old.

— Yes, but not knowing that I would write it!

—There is nostalgia in the work, but there are also critical notes.

— Criticism must exist. I don’t understand nostalgia in this case as regretting what we lost. Instead, it’s a look back that tries to salvage information about what happened. I don’t appreciate all losses equally. I did in some cases, like with buildings that were demolished without thinking. But I’m interested to see what’s out there today and what else we can salvage.

—He also talks about the organization of Christmas decorations in the city before.

— In the second half of the 1950s, merchants from Marqués de Valladares Street imitated other cities that developed a model of attracting customers by decorating their windows and then the streets. That’s how it started.

— There is room in the book for interesting things, such as the reference to the callejón del Chinito or the origin of the name of the Bonín building.

— The alley resists. It is not known why it was named so. And the Bonín building refers to Angelina Bonín, the promoter of the construction with her husband. It is one of the rare noble buildings with a female name, even if it went beyond just the surname.