Dome supported by numbers
- Zalla (Bizkaia), 16th century. In the depression of La Mella dominated the Terreros lineage, which controlled the house tower, the ferreria, the mill and the bridge until the Urrutia family came to compete for this superiority.
This area of the Commissions was a strategic point due to the passage of the Kadagua's real road, as well as the Camino de Santiago, and the compensation for the passage of the bridge represented an attractive income for the main tribes of the area. That is why the Urrutia built a palace, its ferreria, three other mills and a bridge, and gradually broke the balance for them.
In the 17th century Antonio Urrutia Salazar married Jeronima Atxuriaga Murga. Being his only daughter, Juan Martínez Atxuriaga, at the death of his father, received numerous assets and a commission: to build a chapel in honor of his father and the rest of his family. Thus, the chapel of San Antonio de Padua was built, in which the sculpture of the deceased was housed.
In recent years, the City of Zalla, in collaboration with the company Ikusmira Ondarea, is working to restore the splendor of the chapel and palace of La Mella. Recovery work started about a year ago and is expected to last for a period of three years. The hermitage was in a miserable state, abandoned by plants, bathed by water and animals, and several beams were collapsed. The situation of the dome was particularly critical and its consolidation was the first job. Although the dome of the hermitage is not seen from the outside, it was important to make this effort inside at that time, since the dome was a representation of the sky. And even more important in terms of the structure of the building, as the dome separated the weight from the roof.
A special visit to the hermitage of La Mella on the occasion of the European Heritage Days was organised on 24 October. The objective of these days is to unite heritage and education, and the dome of La Mella offers a good opportunity for this, not only from the historical point of view, but also from different areas: mathematics, physics, chemistry, geometry, resistance of materials, mechanics… That is, besides learning from the past, the dome also helps to learn numbers, since to maintain a cover of 64 tons many numbers are needed.
During the October visit, engineer José Luis Ruiz used a quote from Pythagoras to highlight the importance of the numbers: “Constantly work on the science of numbers, because our crimes are nothing but miscalculation.” When the hermitage was built in the 17th century, no crime was committed, but time and external agents have jeopardized its structure and now it is the same numbers from four centuries ago that are being used to sustain the dome and thus recover its heritage.
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