Spain’s Macarena makeover mishap!

She has endured cannon fire, civil strife and – if legend is to be believed – a splash of Protestant claret. Yet the 17th-century Virgin of the Macarena, one of Spain’s most revered Catholic images, met her fiercest trial at the hands of a restorer.

Last summer, Seville’s Brotherhood of the Macarena unveiled the polychrome wooden figure after five days of work. The statue, a star of the city’s Holy Week processions and resident of the Basilica of the Macarena, emerged…transformed. Cleaner, certainly. But with eyelashes so luxuriant they would have caused envy in a cosmetics aisle – and the look of someone who’d had “a nip and a tuck.”

The reaction was immediate and operatic. “This isn’t her. This isn’t the Virgin of Seville,” moaned one brother. “They should have left her as she was.”

Diario de Sevilla noted that while her face appeared clearer, it was the “significantly more abundant” lashes that altered her famously sorrowful gaze.

An apology followed. The basilica closed for an hour. The Virgin reappeared with shorter lashes, after correction of an “undesired effect”. The faithful remained unimpressed. The next day brought another closure and yet another unveiling, this time reportedly closer to her pre-restoration look.

Spain’s social media duly erupted, recalling the 2012 “Monkey Christ” fiasco and prompting increasingly renewed calls for stricter regulations on art restoration. Can’t come soon enough!

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Nora Johnson’s 14 critically acclaimed psychological suspense crime thrillers, including the latest ‘The House of Secrets’ (www.nora-johnson.net), all available online at Amazon etc. Profits to Cudeca cancer charity.