Sacred and secular unite on Basque church’s walls

The Iglesia de San Miguel is the pride of Antezana de Foronda, a tiny town in Spain’s Basque Country. Yet the 16th-century church, with its spectacular wooden carvings and baroque altarpiece, had fallen on hard times.

Residents had saved the church once, decades ago, when they mobilized to fight an airport extension steps away from the sanctuary. In recent years, forces of nature and the passage of time were taking their toll on the town shrine.

“We saw our cultural identity slipping away,” said Diego Bermejo, a philosophy and ethics professor at the University of Deusto in Bilbao, who lives in the town of 100 people, which has no public buildings other than the church. “A town that lets its past die kills its future.”