Parque de San Lázaro

Overview

Parque de San Lázaro is the public park at the dead centre of Ourense, created in 1904 on a square plan and laid out over two levels as avenues of benches under heavy tree cover. The city’s tourism office describes it as the heart of modern Ourense, the point around which the commercial and economic life of the city organises itself.

That is the honest headline: this is a working city square rather than a sight. It is where people in Ourense arrange to meet, where the shopping streets empty out at lunchtime, and where administrative buildings sit along the edges.

Two things in it are worth the ten minutes even if you were only cutting through. One is the baroque fountain in the middle, which was carted here from the Cistercian monastery of Oseira. The other is the Gothic church of San Francisco, built in the 14th century on higher ground near the cathedral and reassembled stone by stone on the park in 1929. Neither belongs here. Both were moved because somewhere else in Ourense needed the space more.

Visiting

There is nothing to buy and nothing to book. The park is open ground in the middle of the city, free to walk into from any side, with the shopping streets of the centre running off its edges. Twenty minutes covers it properly.

Start at the fountain, because everyone else does. It sits at the centre of the park: a wide lower basin with jets playing towards the middle, ringed by a granite platform with benches set into it. The city lists it as the park’s outstanding feature and confirms where it came from: the monastery of Oseira.

From the fountain, the main entrance side gives you the Asorey angel on its pedestal, and the upper level holds O Carrabouxo. The children’s play area is divided by age group. Between them, the benched avenues under the trees are the actual point of the place, and on a hot afternoon they are fully occupied.

The church of San Francisco stands on the park and is worth walking round the outside of even if you go no further. Look up at the west front for the rose window above the pointed portal, then look low on the carved capitals of the doorway for the piper. A gaiteiro on a 14th-century Galician church doorway is the sort of detail that repays the neck strain.

History

From lazar house to public park

A hospital for lepers and pilgrims stood near this ground from 1119, and gave the site its name. The park itself dates from 1904. A chapel dedicated to San Lázaro stood on it, inaugurated in 1895 or 1896 to a design by the architect José Antonio Queralt Rauret, on the site of a much older 12th-century chapel to the same saint.

The chapel did not survive the modernisation of the square. In 1950 the council resolved to clear it, to tidy the ground around the government building finished in 1948, and in 1952 it was taken apart with every stone numbered.

The church that arrived in pieces

The Franciscans lost their own church first. After the 1835 exclaustration the convent site near the cathedral passed to the army, which turned it into a barracks in 1843 and held it until 1987. When the Ministry of Defence wanted to enlarge the barracks, the 14th-century church was dismantled and rebuilt on Parque de San Lázaro under the architect Manuel Conde Fidalgo, work that was inaugurated on 30 May 1929.

The rebuild was not a clean copy. The bell tower of 1599 disappeared in the move, and the Gothic west front, with its rose window over a triple-archivolted portal, was not put in place until 1955. The church was declared a national historic-artistic monument in 1951 and holds Bien de Interés Cultural status. The Gothic cloister stayed behind at the original site, which the tourism office lists, correctly, as a cloister without a church.

Monuments of the 20th century

The largest sculpture in the park is the granite figure carved by Francisco Asorey in 1951, set on a pedestal at the main entrance: a fallen angel holding a laurel crown, raised in memory of the Nationalist dead of the Civil War. It is a Franco-era monument, and reads like one.

Later and lighter is O Carrabouxo, on the upper level, a 1992 work by César Lombera honouring the cartoonist Xosé Lois González Vázquez, whose character has run in the local paper La Región.

Tips

• Free, unticketed and unenclosed. There is no gate, no desk and no opening time to plan around; the city treats it as a public square in its parks and gardens listing.

• Time a visit for the fiesta of San Lázaro if the dates work. It falls on the Sunday before Palm Sunday, and the park fills with dozens of stalls selling rosquillas and melindres.

• Other dates in the city calendar to check against your trip: Entroido in February or March, Os Maios on the first Sunday of May, the Fiestas Mayores around Corpus Christi in June, and the magostos on 11 November.

• Use the two levels. The upper terrace, with O Carrabouxo on it, is a step out of the through traffic and generally quieter than the ground around the fountain.

• Do not plan a day here. This is a twenty-minute stop between the old town and the shops, best used as a break rather than a destination, and it sits close enough to everything in central Ourense that you will cross it several times without trying.