The Atlantic Romanesque Plan’s team has finished the pre-monitoring works in the church of San Martín de Tours in Salamanca, as a previous step to the intervention in the temple, which will begin soon and is aimed at controlling the conservation state of the building and transforming it into an touristic information point of the Plan.
Technicians of the Atlantic Romanesque Plan have performed the pre-monitoring works previous to the intervention in the San Martín de Tours church in Salamanca. In this way, the church’s points have been visualized and the first tests have been performed to understand where the wireless sensors that will be used to control the environmental and structural parameters, aimed at monitoring the conservation state of the building will be placed.
The devices will be placed in the areas where the main pathologies are located and will send data to a central server, allowing for the detection of important variations or alterations. Along with these control points, restoration works will be performed in the Puerta del Obispo’s dome.
“At Fundación Iberdrola España we value highly the innovation component in the projects that we carry out and in the Atlantic Romanesque Plan the new technologies are put at the service of the restoration of heritage thanks to the monitoring system developed by the Fundación Santa María la Real del Patrimonio Histórico that has allowed us to advance and change the way we view maintenance, going from a reactive action towards a preventive one” says Carmen Recio, responsible for the areas of Art, Culture and Biodiversity at Fundación Iberdrola España.
This way, after some monitoring time, we will have objective data on the building’s conservation state, which might help the development of futures interventions and projects.
Romanesque information point
The romanesque origin church of San Martín de Tours is dated from 1103. Even though today the medieval testimonies of the temple are completely masked by the sequential changes performed through time and because of the modern buildings in the surroundings, the location of the building next to the city’s Plaza Mayor make it an ideal place to create an information point for the romanesque and more specifically an open window to the Atlantic Romanesque Plan.
This way, parallel to the monitoring works and the restoration of the dome of Puerta del Obispo, a museistic space will be conditioned to be used to promote the Plan and disseminate both the intervention accomplished in San Martín and in the remainder of the churches included in the project. The technological resources and a new lighting will allow for the creation of a new exhibitive itinerary that respects the spiritual value of the place, combining the strength of audiovisuals with a lighting though up to highlight the most emblematic scultoric and architectonic elements of the dressing room and the romanesque entryway.
In this sense, the Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, managed by María Josefa García Cirac has expressed its satisfaction with the start of the interventions of the second part of the Atlantic Romanesque Plan, which will develop intervention actions in churches of the provinces of Salamanca and Zamora until 2018. Also because this specific intervention in San Martín de Tours constitutes an opportunity for the diffusion of the project from the core of a city that receives hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.
The exhibitive path will be design before and during the restoration works in the dome of Obispo, which means that once they begin the visitor can be informed about its development.
Atlantic Romanesque
The intervention in the church of San Martín is the first rush in this second part of the Atlantic Romanesque Plan. A trans-border cooperation project that began in 2010 and that involves over 20 romanesque churches located in the Spanish Provinces of Zamora and Salamanca and in the Portuguese regions of Porto, Vila Real and Bragança.
Promoted by the Consejería de Cultura y Turismo de la Junta de Castilla y León, the Secretaría de Estado de Cultura de Portugal and the Fundación Iberdrola España, in collaboration with dioceses of each of the areas in which it intervenes, the plan’s main goal is to conserve, restore and value heritage, placing the foundation for a sustainable growth and development of the territory, through the creation of jobs, the socioeconomic dynamization and the touristic promotion of the rural nucleus in which it works. The Fundación Santa María la Real del Patrimonio Histórico was entrusted for the development of the interventions in the Spanish part.
The plan’s objectives remain in force and the team has decided to continue with it until 2018, focused not only on the restoration but also in the dissemination and cultural management as a key part of the socio economic dissemination of the territories. This way, throughout this year, an investment of 300.000 euros, 200.000 of which supported by the Junta de Castilla y León and 100.000 by the Fundación Iberdrola España will be done, which will allow for the intervention in the church of San Martín de Tours, as well as other interventions of communication and dissemination.
