A Spanish Mystery: Is a ‘Masked Restorer’ to Blame for a Church’s Botched Repair?

• Yet another imprudent fix in a land plagued by vigilante handymen led to angry calls to find the culprit — and to a soul-searching question: Does Spain just have too much history in need of upkeep?

The Romanesque church that sits above the river in the Spanish village of Castronuño used to look like many others that dot the land: not too decrepit for a 750-year-old, but not particularly well-kept either.

Then in November, Mayor Enrique Seoane noticed something that gave him a shock and caused a scandal in Spain.

In a photo taken by one of his neighbors, Mr. Seoane spied a seam of very modern cement that someone had poured into a decidedly ancient archway. It was an apparent homemade repair job to keep the church’s eastern flank from falling in.

The work was done by an unknown “masked restorer,” the mayor told a local journalist in a story that soon spread across Spain. While this might conjure visions of a superhero secretly coming to the aid of an aging church, that is not how the mayor’s words played in Spain. Instead, they stirred up bad memories in a country whose small towns and villages had been scarred before by the eyesores these sort of vigilante repair efforts leave behind. The figure of do-gooder gone bad was epitomized in Spain by Cecilia Giménez, a grandmother then in her 80s, who made headlines around the world after her botched restoration of a century-old fresco of Jesus crowned with thorns called “Ecce Homo.” The result was so bungled, authorities at first thought the painting had been vandalized. association.