The German who let the sea take him

Manfred Gnädinger, known in Galician as O Alemán and then simply as 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. It is said that he went mad after falling in love with the teacher of the village and being rejected. After that, he wore only a loincloth and subsisted on a diet of vegetables he grew himself. Man was a strict vegetarian and would swim out in the ocean, even after he was fifty years old.

For thirty years, Man lived in a small 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 over 1,000 notebooks. Man's only source of revenue was a small fee - 1€ as of 2002 - for everyone visiting the museum he created.

In November 2002, the oil tanker Prestige developed a huge leak during a storm off the coast of Galicia, releasing oil into the Atlantic. The spill reached Man's hut and his sculptures, destroying most of his life's work. According to locals, he died of melancholy and sadness 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