THE OLD ECCLESIASTICAL PRISON

The old ecclesiastical prison, which was the old prison of the judicial district of Lugo, is located next to the historical wall of Lugo. It was one of the most important civil and public constructions.

It was built between 1882 and 1887 and it was the second model prison in Spain, after Madrid. The enclosure is a walled rectangle with sentry boxes at the four corners. It was the first prison to have individual cells and it was built with a radial structure in which everything could be seen. It was distributed in 56 individual cells, 6 dungeons and 11 cells for non-communicated prisoners and punished prisoners. The purpose of the individual cells was to improve hygiene and encourage greater communication. There usually lived 115 prisoners in it, but between 1936 and 1940 it housed 900 inmates.

It has several entrances, two of them with access to the courtyards. The whole of the old prison is made up of three buildings: one for the administration and the court, another for the cells and the third one for the common service area, together with the infirmary, kitchen, and treatment rooms, among others. And there was a tower where a single person supervised all the cells in the inner courtyard.

The old prison was a mixed prison, the cells that we see in the circular area were for men and the women's cells were in a rectangular module that was built at the back.

To access the women's cells, you must climb a flight of stairs. As we mentioned before, they were in a rectangular module where there were 22 cells. In 1936, 14 women entered the prison for political reasons, most of them for being sisters, mothers, or girlfriends of an escaped prisoner. At the time of the worst influences, between 1939 and 1940, more than two hundred women lived there.

The men's prison, on the other hand, was built on a Panopticon model; a semicircular space with cells and corridors on all its floors, and a central tower where the security post was located. There were 32 men's cells and they had dimensions of 4.5 by 2.5 metres.

In one of the men's cells, we can see the altarpiece of the chapel that was in the module of the women's cells. This altarpiece came from the old Armanyá chapel. From the 18th century, it is in rococo style and is made of polychrome wood.

The old Lugo prison housed thousands of political prisoners for almost a century, especially during Franco's regime. One of the best-known prisoners who resided there for just over three months was Rafel de Vega, one of the best-known Lugo doctors and representatives of the Republican side in the town, who was shot in 1936. Faced with serious overcrowding, the hospital closed its doors definitively in 1981.

The City Council of Lugo, to commemorate the memory of all the people affected, decided to rehabilitate the space, and recondition it so that, in 2017, the building reopened its doors completely renovated and as a social and cultural centre "O Vello Cárcere". This reform was carried out by Juan Creus and Covadonga Carrasco.

The space was completely redistributed in such a way that you can find different exhibition rooms, a library, a leisure room for the little ones, a theatre with 140 seats, an auditorium, different rooms for painting, archaeology, and handicraft workshops. In one of the buildings is the visitor’s reception, where they give information and explain a bit of the history of the prison and how the day-to-day life of the prisoners used to be. The building with the cells can be visited and the original elements are maintained. In addition, the architects wanted to respect some of the most emblematic areas of the prison, such as its semicircular shape from which the guard could see the different cells of the prisoners, and which denotes the concern of the time for safeguarding the security and health of the inmates who lived inside the building. Proof of this is that the inmates had access to drinking water from their own cells, something that was not common at that time.