Kirsty Mckenzie
SLOPPY restoration work on a historic Spanish monument has been slammed by critics, comparing the work to “a job’s worth builder”.
The renovations completed at Antequera Dolmens in Antequera, Malaga have been lambasted by experts from the Department of Prehistory and Archeology of the University of Seville.
The professors, who were asked to review the work done on the 6,000-year-old monument, said the damage to the complex was ‘urban cruelty’.
Expert Leonardo García Sanjuán said: “An architect who builds terraced houses cannot intervene in a 6,000-year-old monument.”
García Sanjuán, along with co-author Coronada Mora, warns that the excavations in the Menga dolmen between 1842 and 1847 by Rafael Mitjana and Ardison already ‘changed the appearance’ of this megalithic construction, with ‘the presumed accumulation of the tumular mass extracted in another area different from the original one.
They continued that by beginning in the 1980s, ‘there were also interventions that affected the physical integrity of the monuments’ including ‘the brutal exterior transformation of the Viera dolmen in 2004’.
The experts also blasted the renovations done between 2001 and 2003 on the interior walls of the Menga dolmen, which they note was done ‘without geologists who knew the properties of the rocks or specialists.’
The authors added that today there is an ‘urban fierceness’ in the Antequera dolmens, which ‘is an intensely urbanized area with concrete paths and squares, parking lots, a visitor center’.
