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Joaquín Donezar – Last waxworker in the Basque Country and Navarre. Source: Fernando Uhalde.

I would ask anyone who reads these lines to try to disconnect mentally from the 21st century and to go back two or three centuries. We have to go back to those times when there was no electric light and people lit up with candles, when most of the floors were wooden and had to be cleaned and gleamed, when the souls of the dead worried them to the point of offering them light to pass from one life to “the other”, when wax was often used as money, paying for the light of public spaces and the church with it… It was then, and it has remained so until a few decades ago, when wax had the importance and value that we find difficult to imagine today.
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