Pepe de Olegario's Maps and the Coast of Death: A Column by Patricia Almarcegui

The paintings were on the second floor. The hotel had a great idea and decorated the floors with pieces from local artists. We approached. They were large, spacious, well-organized, and looked like cartographic images. I don't remember how many there were, five, six, or seven, but it was different work than I had seen before. We stopped, read them, located the places, tried to photograph them, and asked about them at the reception.

We were told there were more at Cape Finisterre. We went to see them during that vacation week along the Death Coast, the first outing after the lockdown. One of those days we passed through Sardiñeiro and, although I already knew that the author of the images, José López Redonda, also known as Pepe de Olegario (1941), was born and lived there, we didn't stop. A few weeks passed, and it was time to buy Christmas gifts, so I decided to. I called his gallery in La Coruña, and since then, we have one of his nautical maps at home. It also coincides with one of the routes we took during those days. "North Atlantic Ocean. Northwest Coast of Spain. From Cape Toriñana to Punta Lens."

Pepe studied nautical science in Ferrol and worked from his youth fishing at sea searching for grouper, all the way to Cape Saint Vincent in Portugal long before the GPS system was introduced. Over more than forty years he leveraged his maritime experience to draw and write nautical charts of the Galician coast and shape the tragic maritime history of shipwrecks and wrecks. Pepe documented, compiled, and studied the journeys of the sunken ships.

In his cartographic models, the vessel's name and the sailors appear, along with the purpose of their navigation, where they were headed, whether they carried cargo or not, the years they had been fishing, and why they sank in the treacherous depths of the Death Coast. Sometimes the reefs were such that the drawings of the doomed ships multiply and create a form of dense, dark marine calligraphy when viewed from afar. Seeing them, contemplating them, trying to learn what happened there is a permanent fascination. Just like the dramatic attraction of death, which coincidentally coincides with the Death Coast. The name given at the beginning of the 19th century after a series of British shipwrecks due to the increase in marine traffic to Asia.

Pepe has found more than a thousand shipwrecks and at 83 years old claims he still has more boats to discover. That is one of the great merits of his work and the added value to many of the artworks he creates: his experience as a sailor and his knowledge of the sea. The wrecks he encountered, and knowing he was able to navigate around them and survive them. Nautical charts turned into works of art, imbued with the reality of his experience.

When I bought the nautical chart, I thought maybe I could get it signed, but the gallery told me it wasn't possible. It was during the pandemic, and Pepe lived outside of La Coruña. I know that. I should have stopped in Sardiñeiro that day. I would have listened to him talk about a thousand things and maybe he would have told me what I now read in the cartographic model: "Many of these ships that crashed on the coast were knocked off course by the current, navigating by estimate for many hours or days without being able to locate themselves due to fog or bad weather (...) Let's not forget that at sea the precautions taken are never exaggerated."