A little over a week before the Christmas Lottery draw, Feliciano Figueiró could almost say that he has won the Jackpot. They won’t add zeros to his bank account, but the awards he receives this year are a great source of pride for him, especially since they come from his own neighbors. With almost millimeter precision, he has reproduced to scale a total of 34 great works of architecture in his workshop in Camos. And that ability to turn his great fans into art has earned him a special mention at the Nigrán del Concello Awards gala in May. Now the A Camoesa neighborhood association has named a park just 200 meters from his house after him. The plaque in his honor will be unveiled this afternoon at an event organized starting at 5:00 p.m. in which the group Os Alegres do Val Miñor will perform.
He is “moi grateful”, but he faces the tribute with as much surprise as modesty. “This is not more like a hobby, it is not a big deal”, he assures, surrounded by some of his works in the shed attached to his home, in which he has replicated cathedrals such as those of Santiago, Tui, León, Burgos, the Sagrada Familia or La Almudena e churches such as that of its parish, San Roque de Camos, the Votive Temple of the Sea of Panxón, the old collegiate school of Baiona, the Pilgrim of Pontevedra or the Vera Cruz of O Carballiñoe including the Oia Monastery. Others have come from there. prodigies of architecture such as the Tower of Hercules, the Eiffel Tower, the Rande Bridge or the Ourense Millennium Bridgeas well as boats like the Juan Sebastián Elcano.
Before making the pieces with wood and blown sand, he visited the models and photographed them hundreds of times.
It all started almost sixty years ago, when I worked on board an English cable operator. The idle hours of the journey pushed him to begin his taste for marquetry and he composed his first piece, the ship in which he sailed. He immediately returned home to work as a truck driver in a prestressing company and had to take a hiatus from his hobby until retirement. From then on he dedicated all his free hours to models, until he the infirmities of age have forced him to hang up the saw barely two years ago.
Now, at 83, he reviews his work through the pages of a photographic album. Some of the pieces are still stored in his shed. Others have been taken to the buildings that they copy, although they have not always been exposed to the public as they would like. The model of the cathedral of Santiago was “thrown away in a warehouse” after the recent rehabilitation works and that of the monastery of Oia is displayed “almost without light without care”, he laments.
He has never asked for anything in return for his works, only that they be shown properly. For the “affection that I gave them after so much time around the work they gave me.” And it is that some of the projects have taken more than a year, such as the Compostela cathedral. It wasn’t just the construction. Before getting down to work, he traveled several times to each of the models and took hundreds of photographs to imitate every detail.
Then it was time to collect the material that they gave him in carpentry and that he was recycling. Wooden planks and blown sand centered the structures to which he added all kinds of ornamentation in windows, doors, bell towers… “I liked that they were as close to reality as possible,” he explains.
Now “falla vista ea artrose non perdoa” and confesses that he is bored “quite” since he has left it. He has the affection that his neighbors and the Council will show him today and the honor that his name appears on the street and in the memory of Camos and Nigrán.
