San Marcial has had three known chapels dedicated to him in Lanzarote, as the written records attest and as archaeological science will now confirm too. Through a project of surveys with test pits at Vistas del Santo, in the hamlet of Maciot (Yaiza), the Directorate General of Cultural Heritage is searching for the second chapel of Lanzarote's patron saint in order to recover part of the island's 18th-century history.
The team, made up of archaeologists Jesús Cáceres and Joachim Ehrenhöfer from the specialist firm Tegue, has carried out ten archaeological test pits, eight of which have yielded positive results by locating material that can be studied in depth. The work focused on the search for the chapel's original walls in order to understand the dimensions and position of the vanished building.
"We consider the work we are carrying out to be very important, because it involves investigating the chronological sequence and the places through which the conquest advanced across the island by way of sacred spaces," says Nona Perera, Director General of Cultural Heritage.
References such as "ethnography, place names, the road network, cartography and archaeology" provide very important information for pinpointing this ecclesiastical building precisely. However, "no conclusive proof has yet been found in the archaeological material to indicate the existence of a place of worship", which is why a new season is needed in order to "carry out an open-area excavation in those places with the greatest archaeological potential", Perera explains.
This project studies the earliest phases of Christianity on the island: "the creation of a chapel, a pirate attack, the disappearance of the chapel and everyday life around that structure," explains Cáceres, who maintains that "this site is comparable to the Zonzamas site".
For the time being it is not known exactly when the Maciot chapel was built, but it is known that it disappeared "around 1744 as a result of a Barbary raid that set fire to the church", the archaeologist stresses. Once this second chapel was destroyed, "a third was raised under the patronage of the French saint in the area of Femés, where we find it today", he maintains.
It is worth recalling that the first ecclesiastical building in the Canary Islands was the chapel of San Marcial de Rubicón, erected in 1404 by Jean de Béthencourt on the Rubicón coast in Lanzarote, the place where the European conquest of the archipelago began.
In this regard, the results obtained by the firm Tegue will be passed on to the team behind the "Archaeological research project at San Marcial de Rubicón" in order to share knowledge about this historical context. That latter project forms part of a collaboration agreement between the Canary Islands Government, Yaiza Town Council and the archipelago's public universities to study the first contacts between European and aboriginal culture.