Living in a lighthouse: that dream, impossible?
Who has not ever wondered what it would be like to live in a lighthouse? What will it look like from the inside? Will it be cold? What happens if you get sick? How does the lighthouse creak? What is heard? Will not the incessant wind or the loneliness of months drive you crazy?
Few territories as fertile to the imagination as the lighthouse. A symbolic place, capable of attracting all eyes while shedding light and that, if we get grandiloquent, we could define as impregnable luminary in permanent dialogue with God and the arbitrary terribilità of him.
Nevertheless, the life that Julio Vilches tells us in Sálvora. Diary of a lighthouse keeper (Ed. Hoja de Lata) is not at all a hermit nor does it stop at theodicies . His is, in fact, a daily life that is as prosaic as it is extraordinary.
A life of laborious trade that requires cleaning the carbon vaporizers, degreasing the optics, filling the oil tanks every two days, climb up and down the narrow staircase to turn on the flashlight; push the carousel of crystals so that it acquires its inertia...
abandoned paradise
But man does not live (or die) by work alone, since during the 37 years that the lighthouse keeper was stationed in Sálvora, That enclave of the Arousa estuary received an incessant flow of friends and castaways.
Is a noisy loneliness possible? In the pages of his blog, parties, dawns, books abound; the barnacles that are eaten like pipes; the nights of guitar, fireplace and stars in the telescope; the globetrotters who come and go, the esoteric seances; the deer, the wild horses, the loves and two daughters raised in the light of the lighthouse: the girls Isla and Vera.
In summary, a life as a hippy of the 80s, non-conformist and iconoclastic, but with the peace of mind of having won a state competition for Maritime Signals Technician , which was then a guarantee of extravagant and wild life, but very well paid.
An ideal existence for a lover of the elements and saltpeter, that for 37 years he had on the island of Sálvora his particular paradise on earth.
'Salvora. Diary of a lighthouse keeper', by Julio Vilches
AND WHAT IS SALVORA?
Sálvora (now in the news due to the premiere of The island of lies, a film that tells the story of the shipwreck of the ship Santa Isabel in 1921 and the heroic intervention of three villagers) are two square kilometers of beaches and virgin forests in the Arousa estuary.
Today it belongs to the Xunta de Galicia and is part of the Atlantic Islands National Park. Like the Cíes, it is possible to visit it.
But in 1980, when Julio Vilches arrived, with his opposition to lighthouse keeper in his backpack, the island was still “feudal property” of the Marquises of Revilla and in the manor of the lords lived an ancient caretaker, who kept the rabbit hunters at bay.
'The island of lies', directed by Paula Cons
In this excerpt, the author describes how it was the cold war of these two antagonistic worlds: that of the lighthouse and that of the “owners”:
“Like every summer in August, the owners of the island have come to spend two weeks, with children, children and relatives…, about 20 people who settle in the port manor house. We don't want complications, so it seems that we have an unspoken agreement: the aristocrats move through the eastern half of the island, while those of us from the lighthouse settle for the western half. (…) But one day some children from the marquisate discovered some friends who had come to see us sunbathing discreetly without a bra among some rocks on the south coast; They notified their parents and went to reprimand them with the caretaker in a scandalous scene full of insults and threats.”
Sálvora: two square kilometers of beaches and virgin forests in the Arousa estuary
To "get revenge", Vilches and his friends venture into the port at night and treachery and they paint a green bra on the mermaid on the postcards.
“The green breasts of the Sálvora mermaid became famous –says the lighthouse keeper– becoming part of the legends of the estuary”. And it is that despite the iron will of the cleaning services to eliminate it, the painting continued there for months, to the exasperation of the Marquises.
A pre-internet and pre-mobile phone world in which Radio communication became the connecting thread between the lighthouse and the world, but, above all, between the lighthouse keepers of Sálvora and the lighthouse keepers of Ons, that they were friends, and they created their own late night radio show which they called The Voice of Bislandia , an imaginary kingdom with its northern (Sálvora) and southern (Ons) territories, where fishermen could enter as long as they said the word breiko.
A whole trip that of this book to a world that no longer exists and whose vestiges are in danger of extinction, since the artisan lighthouse, that is, the fire lighthouse, has been automated for years and the human being has become increasingly secondary in the process.
Luckily we still have literature in literature. Because if they take it away from us even from the headlights, in the end, what will we have left? The belly of a whale?
"A journey to a world that no longer exists and whose vestiges are in danger of extinction"