The fine rain seeps between the niches of the San Román cemetery in Arrecife this Friday. The sky is especially overcast for a May day and the wind echoes in the corners of the graveyard. In the silence between aisles, the bustle of two families can be heard, waiting for something they once dreamed was impossible: to recover the remains of their loved ones more than half a century later.
José Manuel Pose from Cadiz was eighteen years old when his father died while working aboard the Domenech de Varó and is 71 when he will finally be able to bury him. His father Julio Pose was one of the ten fishermen who died on February 6, 1973, after the boat they were traveling on capsized off the coast of Mala, in the north of Lanzarote, during a rough sea episode.
Only two fishermen survived that shipwreck. "I am the eldest, but they [the rest of the deceased's children] were all very young, they didn't know their fathers, it's very sad, very sad," he laments in a conversation with La Voz a few hours after arriving in Lanzarote with his son to prepare for Friday's exhumation.
Numbers 68, 69, and 70 are the ones that until now identified his father, Julio Pose from Cadiz, Jaime Roselló from Zaragoza, and Antonio Rodríguez from Sanlúcar, in the Lanzarote graveyard. This Friday their bodies have been completely exhumed, to then be cremated and be able to travel with their families back home this Sunday.
Nine nameless graves
In the days following the shipwreck of the Cadiz boat off the Lanzarote coast 53 years ago, the sea washed ashore three lifeless bodies. Those bodies were identified by the survivors and by Andalusian fishermen from another boat that was in the area. The official version was that the other seven fishermen lay at the bottom of the sea. However, that was not true.
Communication difficulties, errors of the time, and decisions by the military court have complicated the work of the families who have been trying since 2022 to find their loved ones among nameless graves.
José Manuel Pose's mother died thinking her husband's body was lost in the depths of the Atlantic. She was not the only widow who died with that sorrow. However, life took a turn for her children.
In 2022, the families of the Domenech de Varó began to prepare a tribute for the anniversary of the shipwreck. At that time, press clippings and information kept in the Arrecife archive revealed a reality different from what the relatives had received. Five other bodies were recovered from that shipwreck. In total, seven corpses and not three.
Clinging to the possibility of finding his father's remains and returning him to his hometown, Cádiz, half a century later. José Manuel Pose and other relatives of those who died in the shipwreck initiated a battle in the Canary Islands courts to be able to open those tombs. After a first exhumation of five unnamed niches in 2024, only two fishermen from the Domenech de Varó could be identified among those niches: José Antonio López Gallardo and Tomás Ladrón de Guevara, uncle and nephew, both sailors from Barbate, whose remains could return home.
However, José Manuel Pose and his son José, the most visible faces of this story, had not been able to find the remains of their father and grandfather, Julio Pose, until now.
A hope
After only being able to link two of the five bodies exhumed in 2024 to the Domenech de Varó shipwreck, in September 2025 they carried out a second exhumation of another four bodies. When Jose Manuel Pose had seen his hope gradually fade, because there was only one body left to identify, he clung to the idea that, even if small, he had a greater chance than when he thought his father lay at the bottom of the sea.
After several failed attempts, last Christmas he received a call from the genetics laboratory Labgenetic in Madrid telling him that among those remains was his father's corpse. "I can't say I'm happy, but I'm ecstatic," he explains during a conversation with La Voz. That was the best Christmas gift for the family.
"Psychology professionals say you are unwell because you are going to go through the grief now, you did not go through the grief 50 years ago, you are grieving. Until you find them, bury them, and this is over, you are in permanent grief," Pose confessed days before the exhumation.
A couple of alliances
The Domenech de Varó is one of those stories where reality surpasses fiction. Investigating, the Association of Relatives and Friends of the Victims of the Shipwreck of the Ship Domenech de Varó discovered that of the three niches that had been buried in the cemetery of Arrecife and identified in 1973, at least one was buried with the wrong name.
It was one of the first times that Antonio Rodríguez, a nineteen-year-old boy from San Lúcar de Barrameda, went out to fish, when he died in that shipwreck. His body was erroneously identified by a cousin of the family who was fishing on another boat. This is how his sister, Ana Rodríguez, explains it, who received a call from Jose Pose eight months ago telling her that the tomb with her brother's name, which she knew was at number 69 in the Arrecife cemetery, did not actually hold his body.
"I couldn't believe it, after more than 50 years?", Ana Rodríguez still recalls that call, visibly emotional on her first visit to the island to exhume her brother. The woman from Sanlúcar authorized the association to open her brother's niche and after recovering his remains, they discovered a wedding ring, which was not his.
That wedding ring was engraved: Milagros 9-12-1963, the wedding date of Jaime Roselló Zaragoza, a sailor from Altea and based in El Puerto de Santa María, with his wife Milagros. "When I called him to ask about the inscription, he said - it's my parents' wedding -", recounts Jose Pose a few minutes after the exhumation began, while touching his hand, where he keeps another wedding ring, that of his parents' wedding, which he was able to recover by comparing the corpse.
Fortunately, despite the error, the body of Ana Rodríguez's brother was found in another of the nameless niches that were exhumed last year in Lanzarote, and she has been able to travel to the island for the first time this week to take her brother with her. His brother-in-law was not so lucky, whose remains seem to have remained at the bottom of the sea.
From that shipwreck 53 years ago, families have already been able to recover five fishermen to honor their memory. The rest lay on one of the deadliest coasts in the world. Niches 68, 69, 70, 72, and 76 have now been able to close their story, and some of their families have been able to put an end to a mourning of more than half a century.
Despite the joy, one of the association's family members has not been able to recover her father's remains. "I didn't know how to go alone to Sanlúcar de Barrameda to talk to her, I had to take the vice president and tell him to accompany me, I didn't know how to be in front of María del Mar telling her that the only one who hadn't appeared was her father, it was very hard".
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