Church of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Vigo
Neoclassical 1950s church a Vigo-born bishop built on Monte do Castro to hold his own tomb
Visit details
Overview
The Church of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad is a neoclassical granite church on the western flank of Monte do Castro in Vigo, begun in 1957 to a design by Antonio de Cominges Tapias and modelled, at its patron’s request, on the church of La Madeleine in Paris. It was paid for out of the private fortune of Leopoldo Eijo Garay, a Vigo-born bishop of Madrid-Alcalá who owned the estate around it and meant the crypt to hold his own grave.
That commission produced something Galicia has very little of: a Greek temple in local granite, sitting on a residential hillside where you would normally expect a baroque or a plain twentieth-century parish box. The main front carries a tetrastyle Ionic portico with every element of the order present, an Ionic pilaster is set at each corner of the front wall, and the nave behind it is a simple rectangle.
This is not a monument you tour. It is the working parish church of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad in the Vigo-Casablanca archpriestship of the Diocese of Tui-Vigo, serving a resident population of around 9,660, and the diocese publishes a Mass timetable rather than opening hours. Come for the architecture and the story behind it, at a service, and expect nothing else laid on.
History
The Atalaya estate
The church stands on ground that had a name long before it had a church. In May 1883 a Vigo sale notice advertised “La Gran Atalaya”, a country property with views over the bay and the countryside, ten minutes from the town, walled and supplied with water, bounded on its western side by the Castro castle.
Eijo Garay bought the estate from a Vigo emigrant to Cuba surnamed Ulloa, who on his return had built a chalet there. That first house later became the caretakers’ house and is now the rectory. The bishop then built himself a second house on the property, designed by Manuel Gómez Román in 1927, and it survives inside the grounds of the Mapfre sanatorium that now occupies part of the old estate, altered to the point where the original project is hard to make out.
A bishop’s private commission
Eijo Garay applied for canonical permission to build the church in 1954, offering it to the diocese as a future parish church and allowing the old chalet to be used, on a precarious footing, as a residence for one or more priests. He gave the job to Antonio de Cominges and asked him for something like La Madeleine in Paris, in miniature.
The church was first meant to go on a plot facing calle Panamá, and the site was later moved to land immediately beside the bishop’s own residence. In his project memoir Cominges recorded that he was following Eijo Garay’s instructions, but that the Paris model gave him a neoclassical language rather than a plan to copy: the finished building does not follow the formal schemes of La Madeleine. Building work also changed it. A large hall was fitted into the basement, and the flight of steps run across the main façade to clear it gives the front a Roman rather than a Greek air.
Work began in 1957. Faro de Vigo dates the completion to 1961 or 1962, while the Spanish Wikipedia entry gives 1963. The building was only fully equipped for worship when it was erected as a parish, eight years after the works ended.
The tomb that never happened
Leopoldo Eijo Garay was born in Vigo in April 1878 into a poor family, lost his father at five and moved to Seville with his mother, entered the seminary there at ten and went to Rome at fifteen. He was consecrated bishop of Tui in 1914 at the age of 36, moved to Vitoria in 1917 and to Madrid-Alcalá in 1922, where he stayed until his death, adding the title of Patriarch of the West Indies in 1946. He died at his La Atalaya house on 31 August 1963, a few steps from the church he had built, and he had wanted to be buried in its crypt. His remains went to Madrid instead.
His heirs handed the church to the Diocese of Tui-Vigo on 9 October 1964. The church, the old chalet and their surroundings passed into church hands by agreement between the dioceses of Tui-Vigo and Madrid-Alcalá and the family, apart from one part that had to be bought back from the developers who had acquired the whole property first.
The presbytery rebuilt
The most recent reordering was carried out under the parish priest Alberto Cuevas by the architect Francisco Castro, and it changed the presbytery to suit the liturgy of the Second Vatican Council: a new altar, the priest’s chair, the ambo for the readings, the place where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved, and the baptistery.
The new tabernacle is a casket in oxidised iron, matching the altar and retable, and its door carries a panel in tesserae worked in the purest Byzantine manner by Juan Bernardo, in keeping with the more modern tessera pieces made for the church by the Valencian Vicente Rodilla. The retable, in iron and glass, represents the seventh sorrow of the Virgin; the other six appear in the windows. The ten stained-glass windows were made by the Vigo firm La Belga and show six of the seven sorrows along with Eijo Garay’s two personal devotions, the Cristo de la Victoria and the Assumption of Mary, patroness of Vigo. A rose window was also recovered in the works, left deliberately half-filtered so that its colours shift with the light off the ría.
Visiting
Mass is the only reliable way in. The Diocese of Tui-Vigo lists services at 19:00 Monday to Saturday and at 11:00 and 12:30 on Sundays and public holidays, all year. There is no published tourist timetable, no ticket desk, no guided tour and no visitor entrance: outside service times the building is normally shut. Turn up ten or fifteen minutes before a Mass, sit at the back, and you will see the interior properly.
The address is Rúa Feliciano Rolán 8, in postcode 36203, and the parish can be reached on +34 986 411 773 or at nssoledad@diocesetuivigo.org if you want to check a time before walking up. Entry is free. The parish keeps the building going on donations, so use the collection if you have taken up a pew for the architecture.
Even when the doors are locked there is something to look at, because the church sits in its own railed and walled lawn on the corner of the street and the whole exterior is visible from the pavement.
Walk the long side first. The flank is coursed granite ashlar with tall rectangular windows above a moulded string course, and below that a half-sunken storey with its own low doors and grilled openings, which is the basement hall the architect had to accommodate. Then come round to the front for the portico, with fluted Ionic columns and capitals, the pilasters answering them at the corners, and the plain pediment above. A stone cruceiro and a sacred sculptural group stand in the grounds beside the church.
The building is on the western side of Monte do Castro, below the fortress park at the top of the hill, in a quiet residential pocket rather than in the old town by the port. Plan it as an add-on to the walk up to the Castro, not as a stop between the Casco Vello and the fish market.
Tips
- The only opening hours are Mass times: 19:00 Monday to Saturday, 11:00 and 12:30 on Sundays and holidays. Everything else you read about visiting hours is guesswork.
Timetables at working parishes move for Holy Week, patronal feasts and the odd funeral. Ring +34 986 411 773 or email nssoledad@diocesetuivigo.org the day before if you have travelled for this.
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Go on Sunday morning rather than a weekday evening if you want to see the glass. The ten La Belga windows and the recovered rose window were designed around changing daylight off the ría, and a 19:00 winter Mass gives you none of it.
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Combine it with Monte do Castro. The church is on the hill’s western flank below the fortress, so the sensible plan is the park and its viewpoints first, then drop down to the church for a service.
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Look for the chrismon in the pediment before you go in. Knowing the sculpture that should have been there was cut is the difference between seeing a bare gable and seeing an unfinished intention.
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Do not expect a crypt visit. The crypt was built for Eijo Garay’s tomb and he is not in it, and no part of the building is set up for visitors.
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If you only have one church hour in Vigo and you want art rather than architecture, spend it elsewhere. La Soledad rewards people who find a 1950s Greek temple in Galician granite interesting in itself.
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