Justo Gallego Martínez (also known as Don Justo) (born 20 September 1925 in Mejorada del Campo) is a former monk who has been constructing a cathedral-likebuilding on his own in the town of Mejorada del Campo in the Community of Madrid, Spain, since 1961.[2] Don Justo has named the building Nuestra Señora del Pilar.[3] It has neither any planning permissions, nor the benediction of any church authority.

Life and inspiration

Gallego Martínez was a farmer. His mother, a Roman Catholic, was very pious.[4] His school education was interrupted by the Spanish Civil War.[4]At the age of ten he witnessedcommunist forces, who were fighting Francisco Franco, shooting priests and ransacking the church in Mejorada del Campo; the events left him with little respect for the town’s socialist administration.[5] As a young man, he joined a Trappist monastery but had to leave in 1961, after eight years, when he contracted tuberculosis and his health deteriorated in the monastic regimen.[6]He began to build a cathedral on a plot of land he had inherited from his parents. He had promised that if he recovered from the tuberculosis which had struck him down, he would build a shrine in honour of Our Lady of the Pillar, to whom he had prayed

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