The discreet goodbye of the Corzo pub

The voice of Galicia

SANTIAGO

The premises, which opened in 1969, lose the hotel license and will be a warehouse

The Corzo pub has closed its doors with the same discretion with which it survived half a century in a basement belonging to General Pardiñas. The pandemic has worked as an effective muffler to cushion the disappearance of businesses that arrived up to their necks in water and for those who were no longer enough to see a new dawn on the horizon that was more ecological, more digital and much more annoying. It is difficult to explain the transit through the Compostelan movement of such a unique club, because without ever being fashionable it managed to endure since 1969. With hardly any changes in its decoration, it managed to turn the calendar upside down, and the carpets, the portraits of artists and dim lights bounced back from their chronic lag to become vintage. Maintaining that aesthetic was an exercise in faith, like putting a denim jacket with shearling in the storage room with the certainty that one day they will be worn again.

The resistance to time was its greatest merit, a medal that must be given to its promoter, Jesús Oitavén. Suso has had some impact on several generations, because his was the initiative to open the Búho pub in 1965, in the Viacambre galleries, where the first epicenter of leisure emerged in the capital in the 60s and 70s. An environment that ended degrading and that did not arrive in time to be boosted by the tremendous nocturnal wave of the following decade. It closed in 1980.

For years he also directed the arcade games La Camelia, which had an unmistakable soundtrack with colliding billiard balls, the soundboard of table football and the background tunes of the Galaxian (the Martians). The eighties in vein with the aroma of a closed gym, an environment that had little to do with Corzo, a place for "especially select" older people, Oitavén said in an interview in La Voz in the mid-90s. The questions were asked José Luis Alvite, who was the one who raised the pub to a higher category that only imagination and impossible conversations with the barman Tino Landeira can reach: «That night in Corzo there was so much smoke from smoking that you could shear the air . Do you know, Tino, boy, that I've been waiting for thirty years for one of those women to come down the stairs for whom it's worth entering heaven through the gate of the prison? Unrepeatable.

The smell of the mountains of six-centimeter butts from Ducados left by the best storyteller that the Compostela night had could still be smelled in the last stage of the pub, directed by Ricardo Vázquez. He arrived in May 2019 with a resume under his arm that fit like a glove, after 44 years at the Don Juan, and he turned upholstery and lighting, but his brief resurrection had more to do with that last lucidity of the dying. With the covid it definitively dies as a hotel space, because it has lost its license and has become a warehouse and future showcase for a luxury jewelry store, which is not a bad ending either.

The place disappears after an inglorious trajectory, but it takes a little revenge. Those of us who in the 80s and 90s used to say that it was a junkyard for piterpanesque and hopelessly divorced adults ended up being much earlier the scrap metal that molds the sofas in front of the television on Saturday nights. "The sad thing is the nostalgia of those who live without hope," Suso whispered to Al.

© Copyright LA ​​VOZ DE GALICIA Sapolígono de Sabón, Arteixo, A CORUÑA (SPAIN) Registered in the Mercantile Registry of A Coruña in Volume 2438 of the Archive, General Section, on pages 91 and following, sheet C-2141. CIF: A-15000649.