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Date Published: 01/10/2021
ARCHIVED - Santiago de Compostela cathedral goes over 50 years without paying electric bills
Council will try to get back some of the money owed by the Church amid soaring electricity price crisis
A report by the town council of Santiago de Compostela has suggested that the city’s famous cathedral has not paid its electricity bills since 1968. A plenary session of the City Council has approved a motion to investigate why the cathedral was allowed to use public electricity without paying for decades, and to try to recover the money.
The cathedral in the Galician city is the ending point of the Camino de Santiago pilgrim trail in Spain, and an important tourist destination for thousands of walkers every year. Having completed their pilgrimage, so the legend goes, intrepid hikers will have their prayers answered when made at the Santiago de Compostela cathedral. With the increasingly expensive cost of electricity in Spain, no doubt some of them would have wished for free electricity too!
It has emerged that free electricity was a privilege granted to the cathedral during Spain’s dictatorship period back in the 1960s, but that the local government finally ruled to overturn the law in 2016.
The authorities at that time gave cathedral management a courtesy period to bring their contracts up to date. The cathedral took that time and waited a full two years until 2018 to disconnect from the public network. None of this was under any recorded written agreement, though, and everything was agreed by word of mouth.
Now the City Council of Santiago de Compostela has voted to investigate what happened and try to recover some of the unpaid money, which was sometimes more than 60,000 euros a year.
The vote was far from unanimous, with both the rightwing PP and the socialist PSOE parties abstaining from pressuring the church to repay any money it may owe.
The news has broken during a conference of the Catholic Church in Spain when they condemned gay conversion therapy for the first time, after they were connected with the disgraced ex-Bishop who renounced his dog collar and moved in with his lover, a writer of saucy satanic novels.
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