Chillida's controversial plan to hollow out mountain is reborn

Tindaya was a dream of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida that ended up turning into a nightmare. As he himself remembered, it gave him sleepless nights and a "strange ulcer."

"Years ago I had an intuition that, sincerely, I thought was utopian," the late artist explained to EL PAÍS back in 1996. "Of creating, inside a mountain, an interior space that could offer itself to men of all creeds and colors, a great sculpture for tolerance."

The artist, who died in 2002, found the sacred mountain of his dream - which he had in 1985, inspired by a verse of Jorge Guillén's Cántico and a night-time vision of a hollowed-out mountain - in Fuerteventura in 1994, after rejecting spots in Sicily, Finland and Switzerland. But the site would eventually cause him considerable upset after becoming the object of an endless controversy that curtailed his most ambitious idea and until yesterday seemed buried.

Sixteen years after it all started - and 20 days after the Basque Country's Chillida-Leku Museum closed - the late sculptor's magic mountain has been revived.

The meeting that took place on Tuesday between Chillida's family and Canarian regional premier Paulino Rivero and his environment chief, Domingo Berriel, awakened all the old hopes and set off all the old alarms. The plan is to organize a public competition in the next two months to judge the work, which will cost ¤75 million to make a reality. As Chillida imagined it, the project consisted of boring a cube-shaped cavity 50 meters across into the heart of the mountain, which would be open to the air. However, after the first technical evaluations it was determined that the cube could not be bigger than 40 meters across and that a beam-and-cement structure should first be made to support the mountain's weight.

In recent years the project has experienced its fair share of controversy and legal problems: strange disappearances of millionaire benefits, substantial damages and opportune legislative changes to dodge the numerous figures protecting Tindaya (the regional government recently changed the list of endangered species in the Canaries and approved new rules related to conservation on the mountain).

On one side, you have the will of the artist and the desire to realize his most ambitious work with the support of local politicians. On the other, there is the opposition of ecologists, archeologists, gemologists and anthropologists who say that to hollow out Tindaya, a mountain that rises up on an area of flat terrain where the cliffs seem to change color according to the time of the day, is an attack on the islands' cultural and natural heritage. A 2008 ombudsman's report raised questions about a work that would damage 217 caves of declared cultural interest.

But the Canarian government is now relaunching the project, assuring doubters that construction firms will bear the cost in exchange for the rights to run the monument. It calculates the expenditure would be financed by the sale of tickets to the public. However, critics say it is implausible to assume an influx of visitors big enough to pay back the ¤75 million budgeted for its creation - especially as the Chillida-Leku Museum has had to close its doors precisely because of a lack of visitors.

But according to the agreement made in San Sebastián on Tuesday, following the competition, the hollowing out of the mountain will begin in two months. Eduardo Chillida Leku, director of the Chillida Leku estate and one of the sculptor's eight children, said the revival of the Tindaya project now is just a coincidence.

"We have spent time talking and have carried on doing the necessary steps, such as the environmental impact assessment, which was an essential topic," he said.

"It was a coincidence, just that. Tindaya is a gift given to the Canaries and we will only get the transfer of the intellectual property rights as a work of our father, but it does not have an economic component."