A Casa, the house of José Saramago and Pilar del Río in the town of Tías (Lanzarote) will open to the public this Monday as a museum. Its opening coincides with the fulfillment of the nine months since the death of the Portuguese writer.
The official inauguration of the house took place this Friday with the presence of Violante, the writer's daughter, the Mayor of Lisbon and numerous authorities. The writer's publishers from Portugal, Italy, Spain and Germany and the director of Casa Pessoa, Inés Pedrosa, among others, will also attend. The singer Lourdes Guerra will perform and fragments of the novel 'The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis' will be read.
Pilar del Río, president of the José Saramago Foundation, said this Friday that she decided to open the house to the public because "there was too much spirit, quality and strength in the house for only those of us who inhabit this space to keep it." "The logical thing would have been to dismantle the house and take it to Lisbon (where she has taken up residence) but I understood that it could not be like that."
The house has had to be conditioned to be opened to the public, with an investment of about 150,000 euros, but all the objects, the decoration and the furniture have been preserved as they were when the writer lived there. The director of the house will be Pilar del Río's brother-in-law, Javier Pérez. The house can be visited between 10:00 and 14:30, Monday to Friday, on guided tours, in several languages, which will be held every half hour for groups of up to fifteen people for a price of eight euros and two for residents in Lanzarote.
Visitors will receive a guide entitled 'A house made of books', written by Pilar del Río, which explains the different rooms, both of the house and of the library, which will also be visited and in which some of the objects and works of art that Saramago had are detailed. You will be able to see paintings by César Manrique, Ildefonso Aguilar, Luis Pinto Coelho or David de Almeida.
The guide also explains some of the writer's customs, his favorite places, the visits he received or the music he listened to. Later, an audio guide will be edited by the Ministry of Culture of the Government of the Canary Islands. The house will soon premiere a website: acasajosesaramago.com.
The two apartments above the library will be used for a project, conceived by Saramago himself, of temporary residence for writers. It will be made available to writers, through a scholarship, to reside and write there, with the commitment to carry out a public intervention in Lanzarote.
The tour of the house begins in the entrance gallery. Afterwards you can visit the living room, the writer's study, with his computer, paintings and portraits of other writers such as Tolstoy, Kafka, Proust, Joyce or Lorca, the bedroom, where Saramago died on June 18, the kitchen, through which very relevant personalities from culture and world politics have passed, the garden; and from there you will go to the library building, where Saramago wrote his last two books.
SG-ACN