An unusual hustle and bustle shook the San Román Cemetery in Arrecife this Thursday. A Court of the island authorized the exhumation of five corpses that remained buried in the municipal cemetery and that could belong to the crew of an Andalusian ship that sank 51 years ago in Lanzarote.
From 10.15 in the morning, a device formed by two relatives, forensic doctors and technicians from the Arrecife City Council have participated in the extraction of half a dozen bodies. Until now, their remains rested in nameless tombs, only identified with the numbers 70, 72, 73, 75 and 76.
On February 6, 1973, the Cadiz fishing boat Domenech de Varo capsized off the coast of Lanzarote. That night, its twelve crew members tried to reach the island after suffering a mechanical problem in an engine of the boat. However, the wind and waves ran the fishing boat aground in Mala, north of the island. Of that tragedy only two survivors remained, the skipper Vicente Pérez and the sailor José Manga, who were able to reach land by their own means.
In the days after the shipwreck, the Rescue teams rescued three corpses, which could be identified. The first to be found was that of the mechanic José Bernal, then that of the sailor Antonio Rodríguez and, finally, that of the foreman Manuel Valiente.
The rest of the relatives then gave up the lifeless bodies of their loved ones for lost. The official version they had received said that they lay at the bottom of the sea. Widows and orphans were left without the possibility of burying them, believing that they could never recover them. At least, until now.
Five more bodies were rescued on the coast of Mala after the tragic shipwreck of that February 6, although the information did not reach their relatives, who lived on the peninsula at a time when communications did not cross borders so easily. Jose Manuel Pose, son of one of the disappeared, the fishing skipper Julio Pose, did not discover it until 2022, when in search of information to honor the victims he came across a different story.
"Most of the widows died with the sorrow that their husbands did not appear," confesses José Manuel Pose, while contemplating how the remains that could be those of the shipwrecked are extracted from the tombs. His search through the Municipal Archive of Arrecife and in the local press of the time, led him to come across the possibility that his father could have been buried for 51 years in a cemetery in Lanzarote.
The sound of the hammers that hit the niches, intermingle with the silence of witnessing how the tombs of five deceased are opened. In the murmur of a very clear work, while the operators exhumed two tombs, two forensic scientists, one from Madrid and another from the Canary Islands, extract the bone remains of the bodies that will then serve to identify who each one belongs to.
“It is a lottery for the relatives. Right now we all have a 75% probability that our father is there and a 25% probability that he is not. We are tempting fate, to see if God helps us and we can find all five of them," says Pose, who speaks on behalf of the relatives.
"Finally the time has come after fifty years of ignorance of these burials. With all the judicial authorizations we have managed to reach today, to be able to obtain the samples, contrast the DNA and identify our beloved relatives," he continues. Now, the teeth or phalanges that were preserved in good condition will serve the relatives to finally close a story that has lasted half a century. And, with luck, that will allow them to bury their parents.
