The German who let the sea take him

Manfred Gnädinger, often called Man or O Man, was a German artist who settled in the small coastal village of Camelle, Spain. He arrived in 1962. Locals remember him as a well-dressed and educated figure who quickly became an enigma. He had a romantic relationship with a local woman, not a teacher of the village. After that, he wore only a loincloth and subsisted on a diet of vegetables he grew himself. Man was a strict vegetarian and often swam in the Atlantic Ocean, even in winter.

For three decades, Man lived in a small wooden hut on the beach, creating sculptures out of driftwood, stones, and other elements washed up by the sea. Some of his works have been compared to those of Antoni Gaudí. Visitors would leave a small fee and make drawings for him, which he collected in hundreds of notebooks. At the peak of his career, Man charged one euro per visitor to his open-air museum. One day, a storm named the Prestige hit the coast of Galicia.

The oil tanker leaked thousands of tons of oil into the Atlantic, reaching Man's hut and his sculptures. The disaster destroyed much of his work and took a toll on his health. According to locals, he died of melancholy and sadness in 2002, about a month after the spill. Manfred Gnädinger was exhumed and cremated on the 10th anniversary of his death in 2018 and his ashes were interred in his museum.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons