The Parish Church of San José in Montealto (1960-68). A Critical Review

Abstract

In 1954, the Archbishop of Santiago de Compostela commissioned the young priest José Lamas Pallas to start up the parish church of San José in the Montealto neighborhood of A Coruña, located at the end of the peninsula on which the Tower of Hercules stands. The church was designed by Jacobo Rodríguez-Losada Trúlock, a respected architect who has received little historiographical attention to date. The church is closely linked to the place where it stands. The parish priest and the architect intended it to be a social condenser where religious, educational, professional and even recreational activities would be shared. But by the time the building was completed, religious architecture in Spain was already beginning to lose much of its social relevance, and since then the church of San José has been considered a failed building. Taking as a starting point various unpublished archival materials, this paper aims to provide a new critical reading of the building -as a structure, as a social unifier and as an urban landmark-, with special emphasis on the role played by the parish priest and the community in overcoming the constraints of the time during the laborious process of its construction.