THE MAN WHO BUILT HIS OWN CATHEDRAL
ONE late spring evening in 2018, Justo Gallego Martínez said he’d show me his grave. The old man was warming his hands by a stove in the dim back room of his cathedral. A dusty film coated the concrete floor. The shelves and tables were full of relics, screws, chipped wood, crushed glass, half-eaten loaves of bread. A bare hanging bulb cast the room in jaundiced light.
“I want to be buried here,” Justo said, signalling around him to the cathedral’s cavernous nave and the 20 trembling towers sprawled across thousands of square metres of his own land on the outskirts of the Spanish capital, Madrid.
The cathedral’s crypt would be his burial place. And he’d be buried there because it was his cathedral. He’d designed it entirely in his head, without a single measurement or calculation on paper, without a record of any of the materials he’d used. And he’d done it largely by himself.
I sat near Justo in the gloom and watched as the fire nearby threw shadows across his sunken eyes and recessed temples. He was nearly a century old, a jumble of protruding bones, but energy still pulsed through him.
“Come on, let me show you,” he grumbled.
Grabbing my arm, Justo winched himself up from his seat and led me out the door, his baggy blue coat hanging from his body like wet clothes on a washing line.
Outside, the uncovered frame of a dome 35m high and 10m wide loomed above us. The nave lurched around 45m
