The return home of the fishermen deceased in the Domenech of Varó after half a century in Lanzarote

53 years and two months ago, the destiny of a group of sailors from Cadiz was tragically altered forever. The fishermen on board the Domenech de Varó capsized on February 6, 1973, off the coast of Mala, in northern Lanzarote, with a fatal outcome: ten dead and only three bodies identified. 

That night, its twelve crew members tried to reach the island after suffering a mechanical problem in one of the boat's engines. However, the wind and the swell caused the fishing boat to run aground.

From that shipwreck, two people survived, the skipper of the fishing boat Vicente Yañez and the sailor José Manga, who were able to reach land by their own means. After days, the sea threw up three lifeless bodies, which were recovered by the Emergency teams of the time. The first was that of the mechanic José Bernal, then the one identified as the sailor Antonio Rodríguez, and finally, that of the boatswain Manuel Valiente.

The rest of the relatives then gave up for lost the lifeless bodies of their loved ones. The official version narrated that their loved ones 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 and many died without knowing that their body rested on the Atlantic island that saw them die.

Until four years ago, the sailors' families were unaware that days after that 1973, five other bodies were recovered from the shipwreck area and that, therefore, only two bodies remained at sea. Communications from half a century ago did not cross borders as quickly as they do now.

All of them were buried in the San Román cemetery, in Arrecife, the capital of Lanzarote, in nameless graves, only identified by a number, as also happens with the shipwrecks of people who arrive on the island by raft today. 

A tribute that ended up uncovering the truth

Jose Manuel Pose, son of the until now missing fishing boat captain Julio Pose, did not discover it until the year 2022, when in search of information to honor the victims, he stumbled upon a different story. "Most of the widows died with the sorrow that their husbands did not appear," José Manuel Pose recounted two years ago in front of the nameless graves.

To commemorate the fifty years of the shipwreck, the son of the sailor Jaime Roselló Zaragoza, also disappeared during the shipwreck, the Association of Relatives and Friends of the Victims of the Shipwreck of the Ship Domenech de Varó was created. Since they discovered that there were five nameless graves, they mobilized to try to recover these remains.

“It’s a lottery for the relatives. All of us right now 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," Pose explained.

Now he is closer to closing the story, as his father's is one of the bodies identified in the San Román cemetery. As reported to La Voz, next Friday the remains of his father will be exhumed from the Arrecife cemetery, as well as those of Jaime Roselló Zaragoza and Antonio Rodríguez Rivera, who was mistakenly identified 53 years ago. 

Sailors Tomás Ladrón and José Antonio López, identified in 2024

Until 2024, the remains of two other neighbors from Barbate rested next to three other sailors behind tombstones with the numbers 70, 72, 73, 75, and 76. At the end of that year and after managing to exhume the bodies to perform DNA tests, the remains of Tomás Ladrón de Guevara and José Antonio López, uncle and nephew were identified. 

Ana Ladrón de Guevara, daughter of Tomás, was able to recover her father's body and, finally, bury him near his home. In addition, she visited the coast of Mala to see the place where her father lost his life half a century ago. The woman from Cadiz described that moment as "a very hard, emotional, happy and sad day". Then three other bodies remained to be identified.