The company Castilla Termal and the Alfauir City Council, in La Safor, have an urbanistic-touristic project that plans to convert the family crypt of Ausiàs March into a thermal water spa. In a spa, if you prefer. The crypt, in effect, is located in the monastery of Sant Jeroni de Cotalba, a jewel of the Duchy of Gandia, of the Crown of Aragon and of the Valencian Golden Age (which is the 15th century), a testament to the power of the Borja lineage, one of the most effervescent moments in the history of the Catalan Countries and Southern Europe. Now the Alfauir City Council and the Trénor family – who have owned it for more than a hundred years – have decided to give this unique place in the world a “hotel use”. They call it the Special Protection Plan for the Northern Sector (speculators, when they destroy something, do so by saying they are protecting it) and they are in a hurry to move it forward, so much so that the project's processing has entered a phase they call “acceleration”. The mayor, incidentally, is from Compromís, but he competes with the lifelong asphalt-laying and concrete-pouring right wing in his capacity to accelerate “strategic projects”. From a heritage, cultural, and historical point of view, if this project goes ahead (it is still in the exhibition phase), a true aberration will have been committed.It has been explained/denounced the other day, in an article in the newspaper Levante, by the poet Joan Deusa (don't miss his Ítaca arrasada, an excellent book), of the Saforíssims, a very bright poetic group that includes names like Maria Josep Escrivà, Àngels Gregori, Josep Lluís Roig, Isabel Canet Ferrer and Teresa Pascual. The master Josep Piera, who died recently and was also from Safor, was an enthusiastic reader of Ausiàs March. Piera wrote about March and about the Borjas (as Joan Francesc Mira has also done: this is an article full of great names from our culture) and would undoubtedly receive this news with the wry humor he used to defend himself from consternation. With wry humor and pain. In Sant Jeroni de Cotalba rested the remains of Alfons el Vell and a dozen members of the March family, including Ausiàs' father, Pere March; his deaf sister, Peirona, and the poet's two wives, Isabel Martorell (sister of Joanot Martorell, author of Tirant lo Blanc) and Joana Escorna. I have written 'rested' because nowadays these remains, after being cataloged, are kept at the University of Valencia, awaiting their return after the monastery chapel has been duly musealized. Instead, they want to build a luxury hotel with bubble pools there.Ausiàs March is one of the essential poets of Catalan literature and one of the most important in European culture during the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Any verse of his is infinitely more important for the Valencian Country, Catalonia, and the Balearic Islands than our current constant verbosity that supposedly reflects on the being and non-being of the country. Any aggression towards his memory is an attack that we cannot allow. Perhaps the drama is having to remember it.
