A Coruña's Blue Marble: Remembering Emilia Pardo Bazán

A blue jasper statue in A Coruña honours a writer who knew her blue jasper too. And the journey to get it there was more than smooth. Emilia Pardo Bazán, a Coruña native, never travelled outside Spain. Nor did Lorenzo Coullaut Valera, the artist who created the monument in her memory, until after he finished it. But the three-tonne block of blue jasper from Murcia made it to A Coruña, finished and mounted, for the unveiling on October 15th, 1916.

The procession that led to it was presided by the mayor Manuel Casás, but neither he nor the monument's creator were present when it was unveiled. Emilia Pardo Bazán died in 1921, and the statue stood alone for half a century, unvisited by its namesake. In 2007 it was replaced by a bronze replica. But in 2021, the original returned to its post, as newscasters echoed last century's words: the monument to Emilia Pardo Bazán has finally come home. The new home, the Jardines de Méndez Núñez, is a fitting location: Pardo Bazán was a great admirer of nature, and Gardens of the Mind, her last novel, would be published just a year after her death. Today, the monument stands in a place she loved, which loves her right back.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons